


Harrogate

by ELG



Series: The Tea Shop Detectives [1]
Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-21
Updated: 2013-03-20
Packaged: 2017-12-05 23:13:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 88,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/728993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ELG/pseuds/ELG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Willow and Giles are sent to save what they can from the aftermath of Angel’s fight with the Circle of the Black Thorn. A higher power seems to want Wesley brought back to life and Gunn saved, but for what purpose? With a mystery of his own to solve, Giles takes a healing Gunn and disorientated Wesley back to England with him and Willow to continue their recovery there. In the meantime someone in Harrogate is murdering witches.<br/>ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Quotes from Music & Silence by Rose Tremain (1999), (c) Chatto & Windus 1999; and ‘Newsreel’ from Shooting Script by Adrienne Rich from The Faber Book of 20th Century Women’s Poetry Edited by Fleur Adcock, (c) Faber & Faber 1987.<br/>The ‘Haven Tea Shop’ in Harrogate and ‘Black Cat Bookshop’ in Knaresborough are completely fictional and are not supposed to represent any present or past tearooms or bookshops in those or any other locations.<br/>Violence, explicit Het, not sure if fic is Gen or Pre-Slash when it comes to Gunn/Wesley. Ships include: Wesley/Lilah, Wesley/Fred, Gunn/Fred, Willow/Tara; Willow/Kennedy, Giles/Ethan; Giles/OFC, Wes/Gunn and Wes/Angel crushiness, implications of Willow/Faith, and an obscene proposal from Angelus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

·

> I wanted to see the faces of the dead while they were living.  
>  Adrienne Rich

##### 1: Los Angeles

It was raining; a freezing drenching downpour that made the summer-warmed pavements steam with residual heat. The air crackled, not just with the unspent energy of a lightning storm, but with the sizzle of dark magic. The last time Giles had smelled air that smouldered with so much brimstone and sorcery, Buffy had swallow-dived to her death from a tower of twisted metal.

Beside him, Willow’s green eyes were focused on something he could sense, but not actually see. Like the streets of Los Angeles tonight, Willow was drenched in magic; it was in her bones and her blood, as incurable and unalterable as an n-stage cancer. She could never be who she had been before that absolute contamination of her being by dark magic, but although it had brought her to the brink of destroying the world, it was also enabling her to do the impossible now.

“He’s in here.” 

The house was gothic, imposing. Exactly the sort of home one would expect a warlock to choose. 

“There will be any number of wards, Willow…” Giles began.

She waved a hand, almost dismissively, and he felt the protection spells vanish, rendered as useless as torn cobwebs. He was not sure how much power she was using to do all that she had done since they had both realized that something terribly wrong was happening in Los Angeles. Something had lent them its magic, it was true, but Willow was the conduit chosen and she had already used magic of unheard of power to get them here, and now she was using more to find what remained of Angel and his people. 

“I’m being helped,” she had explained, as she grabbed Giles’ hand just before they were transported in a way that was entirely impossible to these rainy streets.

“By whom? By what?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t think it will last for very long.”

There was no time now to worry about what this was doing to Willow or in what condition it would leave her when this magical assistance was so abruptly withdrawn. They had both been asleep in their own rooms in the coven in England when the vision had hit them simultaneously with the subtlety of an oncoming truck. He had seen the advancing horde of demons, the darkness behind them of fifty thousand more, converging on the human world in an unstoppable tide. He had been out of a bed in an instant, throwing on any clothes that came to hand, and then had darted out into the corridor to rouse the coven, which was when Willow had emerged from her room with a scared but resolute expression and said: “We have to go now or it will be too late.”

They knew things they had no way of knowing; not coherent or neatly assembled, a confusion of information, a baby they both knew was Angel’s son, a baby called Connor, although when Giles had gone to sleep only a few hours before he had known for a fact that Angel had never had a son, that he could not possibly, biologically, have a son; and then the memory had returned of a phone call to Sunnydale and Buffy wandering around in a daze wondering how it could be possible that the man who had left her because they could never have a family together now had a family of his own. Wesley had taken the baby to save it and lost it to Angel’s enemy, and almost died, and the child had returned, an angry teenager. Cordelia had been possessed by a rogue higher power. Angel had taken the position as CEO of Wolfram & Hart – the position that Giles had not been able to comprehend any good reason for anyone on the side of Good to ever accept – because it was the only way to save Connor and Cordelia. Connor’s timeline had been rewritten by the skill of a warlock of terrible power. A warlock called Cyrus Vail. Angel was going to try to bring down the Black Thorn, an attempt that would cause Wolfram & Hart to unleash the forces of its demon army on the frail unreadiness of the human world.

“How do we know this?” Giles demanded tersely, wishing he had snatched up a weapon before they embarked on this impossible journey through space and, quite possibly, time.

“Because we need to?” Willow eased open a door that creaked as if it had beaten out all manner of competition for the role of nail-studded entrance to an evil warlock’s dark lair. “Because we need to know this to help and someone wanted us to help.”

“Who wants us to help and why?”

Willow switched on a light and it felt incongruous, the chandelier shining on that red and black chequered floor. It should be lit exclusively by shadow-casting candles; the room smoky with the flicker of sputtering wicks and the hiss of heated wax. “I don’t think the apocalypse was meant to happen today. I don’t think some of the people who died were meant to die. I don’t think it was their time to be taken.”

Giles looked at the red and black flags beneath his feet and understood. The ancient forces of Good and Evil arrayed against one another, striving to maintain balance. “It’s a chess game. Black had the king in checkmate so White has used its queen.” He gazed at Willow, her red hair like molten copper in the light of the swinging chandelier. “The piece that can move in any direction across the board.”

“The Powers have sent back the demons they didn’t summon and claimed the ones they call their champions. I think they have other tasks for them.” Willow pushed open double doors as if she were steeling herself for what lay on the other side of them.

Giles put a hand up to his head. “Then why…? Why are we here? What’s left for us to do?”

“They may have realized they shouldn’t have used the humans too. Or perhaps they felt they owed them or…” Willow snatched a deep breath. “Or Cordelia called in some old debts…”

That was when he saw the bodies. The red-skinned papery remnant of what had been, until very recently, a demon, exploded fragments of something that looked like crimson ash where its head had evidently once been. Cyrus Vail. He knew that, although it made no sense that he should do so, but apparently it was important that he should realize there was not only no way of saving this one, but no reason to do so either. The second body was human, blood from a vicious wound in the gut having left a crimson puddle around the still warm corpse. The face was marked with blood around his right eye and on his forehead, a gush having clearly welled from his mouth. He was immediately recognizable, but the wide unblinking stare was undoubtedly that of a dead man.

“Wesley…” It hurt so much more than he had expected.

Willow was already running. She flung herself down by the man and took his left hand in hers, placing her right palm on his forehead. “Wesley, you have to come back,” she said with a quiet note of authority in her voice that Giles had rarely heard before.

He crouched down next to them and placed his hand at the man’s throat. The skin was still warm, but there was no pulse. “Willow, he’s gone…” Wesley looked peaceful, despite everything – the proof in the shattered furniture and bloodstains that his death had been violent and undoubtedly painful – yet he seemed calm, quite ready to move on.

“His soul hasn’t left yet. He’s still intact. He can come back.”

Giles closed his eyes, thinking of Buffy ripped out of heaven, denied the peace she had undoubtedly earned. He had never seen anyone look more in need of a rest than Wesley looked now. “We don’t have the right.”

“He wasn’t meant to die.” Willow tightened her grip on his hand and began to incant words that Giles didn’t recognize or even understand. He thought about telling her again that she absolutely mustn’t do this, but the thought was overwhelmed with the question of how was she doing this? It wasn’t possible to bring someone back from the dead by will alone. Not even Willow, with all her extra powers, was capable of that. Healing a mortal wound before life had ebbed, perhaps, but not this. This was impossible. And yet it was happening, which meant that some greater power than Willow must be lending her its will. 

“Giles, I have to do this.” She seemed to understand all the doubts he hadn’t voiced as she laced her fingers through Wesley’s. Giles snatched his own hand away from the man’s body; knowing that in some matters her authority was greater than his. He had been swept up in whatever magical whirlwind had transported them here to be her assistant, perhaps, or her witness. She knew more than he did, which in this instant, perhaps meant that she was the one in charge. 

Willow’s words were louder, clearer, the world beginning to give way to her will with a warning crackle of static electricity. Giles felt his hair stand on end, his skin prickle; it was like being trapped in the midst of the Northern Lights. He saw Willow’s eyes turn black, and then her hair glow white as any star. She was still holding Wesley’s hand. There was a burst of blinding light and an energy so powerful that Giles was flung halfway across the room, the oxygen driven from his lungs, the air singed all around him. He snatched a breath and saw that the light had faded and Willow’s hair was red again, her eyes green, and Wesley’s eyes were open, not in a death-stare, but a blinking attempt to focus that left him gazing at her in utter confusion. In the same instant, Giles felt the power that had guided them here leave them as abruptly as it had found them, gasping as he felt himself suddenly bereft of the clarity and certainty that had guided them so far.

“It’s okay, Wesley,” Willow told him gently. “I’m sorry I called you back. But you’re needed here.” Her hand was shaking violently with exhaustion, her face pale and clammy with a cold sweat. 

“Cordelia…” he gasped, and then with a note of even more breathless confusion: “Fred…?”

Willow tightened her grip on his hand. “Wesley, it’s Willow. Do you remember…?”

He sat up, reaching for his side. Giles saw that there was a jagged cut there, still oozing blood. It looked in need of stitches but it was no longer a fatal injury, more like a vicious stab that had intended great harm yet done no more than cut along the surface; decidedly not the mortal wound of before. Wesley focused on Willow and then Giles and his eyes widened. “Angel.”

“Do you know where he is?” Willow pressed.

“He’s… the alley… We were supposed to meet in the alley…” And then he was up and staggering for the door. Giles caught his arm to support him, while Willow hurried to do the same.

Wesley snatched a breath, coughing violently, and then spitting blood into his hand in bemusement. 

Giles gripped his shoulders to steady him. “What was Angel trying to do?”

Wesley looked as if he were having trouble remembering. “Make a stand, make a difference, make it stop, even for a second, just to stop the wheels from turning.” He still looked as if he wasn’t even sure who they were and Giles tightened his grip on him, feeling as if the man were a will-o-the-wisp at present, someone barely back in the mortal world, mind possibly elsewhere, spirit undoubtedly wounded. Wesley gazed at him without a single glimmer of recognition and said: “I have to find Angel.”

Giles personally thought it would make more sense to take Wesley straight to the hospital to have his still-bleeding wound sewn up, not to mention the blood in his lungs from when the wound had been mortal suctioned out, but he was relentless as an insane asylum inmate with an idée fixe. He moved with as little coordination as any Hammer Horror Igor lurching towards his master and Giles realized that his legs were numb from lying there dead, muscles set in the first inactivity that had swept through his body as it prepared for rigor mortis. That he had been dead and was now alive seemed to be of less importance to Wesley than that he was late for his meeting with Angel and the others in the alley behind the Hyperion. With a jolt of realization Giles wondered if Wesley thought he was dead but still wanted to make that meeting place, presumably so they could all move on to some kind of afterlife together.

The rain was drenching and more of a shock after the temporary relief of being in Vail’s mansion. It washed the old blood from Wesley’s face, and the new blood from his lips when he coughed up clots of arterial fluid that would have congealed in his corpse without their intervention. He didn’t seem surprised or in any way concerned by the quantities of blood he was coughing into his hand and then wiping heedlessly on his jeans, just blinking the rain from his eyes and running as well as he could with his body aching and confused by his jolt from life to death and then back again.

As they rounded the corner to the alley, Giles was half expecting the demon hordes of the apocalypse to be waiting for them, but there were just those gunmetal blue slants of rain, the ground spitting up spray from the impact as if riddled with machine-gun fire. Neon drowned in shivering reflective puddles and the scent of brimstone was so strong here that the air reeked of sulphur, a tarry catch in the back of the throat. Giles saw Willow wince as they rounded the corner, the impact of dark magic hitting her the hardest. She was wraith-pale and looked exhausted, no longer borne on that magical current of certainty that had guided her to Vail’s mansion. Giles suspected her legs were feeling as liquorice-like as Wesley’s, the huge effort needed to drag even a recently departed soul back from the dead taking a toll on her with each extra step.

Wesley staggered a little as the sulphurous rain of the alley washed over him but then forged on, breaking free from their supportive grip and running better now, the confusion of the world he had left and rejoined receded to the simplicity of one fixed idea.

“Angel…?” He shielded his eyes against the rain, turning circles before beginning to run down to the fence at the end. “Illyria?”

It looked as if there could possibly have been a battle here. It was hard to tell amidst the sound of the rain pouring in rivulets down the gutters, thundering onto discarded sheets of cardboard, rat-a-tatting a Sten gun rhythm onto overturned dustbins. Giles reached into his coat pockets and found the small torch he kept there for just such emergencies as these. When the thin beam shone onto the nearest puddle it revealed the water to be red.

“We’d never find dust here…” Willow looked around hopelessly, turning to Giles for confirmation. “I don’t… the power that carried us here, it’s gone.”

“I know. Perhaps we weren’t needed for anything else.”

“But he was so sure he had to come here…” She began to look between the dustbins. “As if someone gave him a message when he was…not alive.”

“He’s very confused – ” Giles broke off as Wesley abruptly spun around and ran towards another pile of refuse shadowed by the high wall.

“Gunn…!” Wesley flung himself down onto his hands and knees by someone he then cradled in his arms. “Gunn…?”

“Oh my goddess…” Willow was already running too.

Giles caught up as she felt the man’s neck. “He’s still alive…” she said breathlessly, “But only just.”

Giles helped her to pull back the man’s sodden jacket and there was the blood…lots of it, all over his sweatshirt. She pushed up the cloth and he grimaced at the wound, looking at her pale exhausted face in concern. “Can you…?”

“I’ll try.” 

He suspected she had less than nothing left and reached into his pockets to see if he had a cellphone, realizing in time that, of course, his wouldn’t work here. Wesley was gazing anxiously at the unconscious man he held and Giles decided it would be quicker to just reach into his pockets and hope he found a phone. Wesley didn’t even notice as he rifled through one, pulled his jacket round and then snagged a mobile from his far pocket.

Giles was dialling 911 even as Willow snatched a breath, closed her eyes and then pressed her hand against Gunn’s bleeding wound. For a moment – a very brief moment – the magic surged around them, a purple swirl of crackling mist, and then Willow fell back, shaking and dripping with sweat. “I can’t… I don’t…” She snatched another breath and then pressed her hands against him again. The crackle was barely discernible this time, the weakest sizzle of magic in the air before she hung her head in exhaustion. “It may be enough. I don’t know. Tell the ambulance to hurry…”

Giles looked at Wesley, who had Gunn clasped anxiously in his arms, wiping the rain from his face as it fell even though more fell a moment later, still wiping it with his sleeve again and again. Wesley looked around the alley as if Angel would somehow magically appear and make everything better. “He said he’d be here,” he said. When he looked at Giles it was still with no glimmer of recognition. “Angel said he’d wait for us.”

Gazing at the two humans that were all that remained – barely – alive of Angel’s adopted family, Giles thought of the Christmas card the vampire had sent to them, a photograph they’d had taken for some flyer they were putting out: Angel in the centre holding the baby he’d been forced to give up; to his right, the girl Fred, who had later been hollowed out by the god-king Illyria, her corpse animated by the demonic power of her murderer; to her right, Cordelia, who had been tricked into giving birth to a rogue higher power, and burned out by the act of doing so, given one last glorious sputter of existence that had been a kind lie to help her friends; and to her right the anagogic demon whose livelihood had been destroyed by association with these people. To his left had been Wesley with a flamethrower and Gunn holding a crossbow. They had looked utterly united as Giles recalled, a family unbreachable and indivisible by any means, and now all that remained were two fragile half-dead humans bleeding in a rain-drenched alley.

Giles closed his eyes briefly, willing the next sound he heard to be the siren of the ambulance coming closer, Willow’s fingers now red-stained and slippery pressed to that wound of Gunn’s that was still oozing blood; Wesley cradling the man in his arms as if with him lay the last of all his certainties.

***

The ambulance had a whited sepulchre feel, shiny and antiseptic yet a place where death was always present. The vehicle blared at them through the slanting rain, a flashing light and dying siren above a square of brightness cut out of the wet night; men in blue shirts lifting Gunn onto a gurney and sliding him into place, the clatter of their shoes on the metal interior, the siren starting up again, a wail of warning that they were conveying the wounded as Gunn bled into sterile dressings and was force-fed oxygen through a mask. Willow’s red hair was dripping rainwater onto her coat, green eyes full of doubt and anxiety. She no longer looked like an instrument of ancient power, a witch with the power to undo death, just a worried young woman afraid that she had done the wrong thing.

The busy paramedics bombarded Giles with questions to which he had few answers. He was busy trying to keep Wesley out of their way, making him sit down where he wouldn’t be jolted onto the patient as they went around a corner. Willow said: “I don’t think I did enough. I didn’t have enough left to…” One of the paramedics looked over his shoulder at her and gave her a reassuring smile before going back to calling out Gunn’s vital signs to a driver who was giving their ETA to St. Matthews Hospital. 

It was beginning to feel more rather than less unreal to Giles as time went on. He had to look down to see if he was still wearing his pyjamas; wondering if this could possibly be a particularly vivid dream. Perhaps someone had called them with news of what had happened in LA and this was his guilty conscience taking his subconscious for a walk. The fine details suggested this was reality though, and the way he could feel the bone of Wesley’s arm as he gripped it through his coat. The ambulance reeked of plastic, the stink of sterile dressings awaiting a crisis that had not yet occurred; Wesley smelt of sweat. No doubt he smelt of blood and pain as well, but Giles wasn’t Angel; he couldn’t pick up the metallic taste of mortality on the tip of his tongue. Only if Wesley had begun to rot could he have even said for certain that he smelled of death.

The ambulance roared on through the neon-lit streets while rain battered against blacked-out windows. A part of Giles was still listening for the wail of sirens, distant screams, the gunfire of a human populace being overwhelmed by the demon hordes he had seen so vividly in his mind. To him the air still had the carbine tang of a world post-battle; its edges singed by demonic flame; but no one else seemed in any way perturbed. Wesley – who would logically have had the clearest idea of what the Senior Partners had been likely to unleash upon them – seemed most indifferent of all, all his attention focused on the man on the gurney. Gunn looked frighteningly close to dead still yet did keep breathing in and out.

The brightness of the hospital interior was a shock after the rain-drenched exterior, the warmth a welcome relief, but the oblong lights overhead making their eyes water, Wesley blinking painfully, words and sounds coming at him from all directions in a way that clearly made no sense to him. Giles remembered Buffy telling him how long it had taken for the world to come back into focus again when she was dragged back from beyond the grave, everything smeared like a wet painting in the rain.

They were still having to hold onto Wesley to stop him stumbling, while he was still ignoring them, perhaps just finding them too confusing to deal with so shelving the fact of them until he had some mental space to deal with it. All his attention was focused on Gunn.

They were bombarded with questions about what had happened and why and to whom. Giles answered them as well as he could, trying to keep hold of Wesley while busy people in white coats clustered around Gunn, blocking Wesley’s view and making him crane his neck. 

“Prepare the ER…” 

A doctor turned to them. “There’s considerable blood loss. We’re going to have to prep him for surgery.”

Willow flinched beside him and he could see her trying to summon power she didn’t have, pale with exhaustion, shaking with what was quite possibly shock. Giles shook his head at her firmly and she reluctantly moved her outstretched fingers away from Gunn’s leg.

A doctor pulled Giles away from the throng, demanding more information. The lies came surprisingly easily: “There was a fight of some kind, we think. They were both stabbed. No, we weren’t with them although we were on our way to visit them. Wesley was unconscious when we found him, but regained consciousness quite soon afterwards.”

Wesley was pushed gently into sitting down on a bed in a cubicle, while, in front of them, people were still doing things to Gunn that looked urgent and frightening. 

“Hello, Wesley. I just want to take a look at this wound. You seem to have lost a lot of blood.” Hands rendered alien by sterile gloves pulled up Wesley’s clothing and probed at his wound while Willow bit her lip anxiously. “I’d expect a deeper wound with all this blood loss.” The doctor gave Giles a look of relief. “I think your friend was lucky.” He turned his attention to Wesley. “Wesley, can you tell me what happened to you?”

Wesley looked at him without any glimmer of comprehension. “We were supposed to meet in the alley.”

“Did someone stab you?”

“Cyrus Vail.”

The doctor looked to Giles for an explanation. “Does that name mean anything to you?”

“I’m sorry, no.”

“Is that a person or a place, Wesley?”

Wesley craned his neck to see what was happening to Gunn. “I don’t remember saying goodbye to Charles.”

“Charles Gunn? Your friend? He’s lost a lot of blood but we’re going to prep him for surgery, okay? Everything that can be done to save him, will be, I promise you.” The doctor was examining the back of Wesley’s head, gloved fingers nimble in his hair as he looked for an injury. He glanced across at Giles. “You found Wesley in the street?”

Feeling guilty about lying to someone who was trying to so hard to help, Giles nevertheless described the alley where they had found Gunn, the alley where the rain would have already washed the bloodstains clean. He doubted anyone associated with Cyrus Vail would be going to the police.

The doctor was giving Wesley a reassuring smile but also seemed to be doing a reassessment of the level of questions he should be asking him. “Can you tell me your name?”

Wesley looked past him. “How would Illyria know how to be so completely human? Where did her compassion come from if it wasn’t from Fred’s soul? What if it wasn’t destroyed? What if it was only consumed?”

The doctor grimaced and turned to Giles. “Was he disorientated when you found him?” He felt Wesley’s neck, hands gentle and skilled.

“Yes, he was disorientated. He doesn’t seem to recognize us but he was…unwell before this attack.”

“Unwell how?”

The doctor shone a penlight into Wesley’s eyes and Giles watched his pupils contract to escape the brightness, his blink of confusion. Giles was painfully aware of the blood all over Wesley’s clothes, glad of the rain that had at least washed it from his face and hands. 

“Grieving.” Gazing at Wesley in the light, Giles realized how terrible he looked, not just back-from-the-dead ill, but long-term self-neglect from what must have been weeks beforehand. “His…girlfriend died very soon after the death of another long-term friend.”

“I can’t find any head injury but this level of disorientation is unusual even after a violent attack. Does he have any history of mental illness?”

_How would I know? I barely know the man_. “No.”

“Drug-use…?” 

“No.”

“Alcoholism?”

“I don’t think so.”

“We’ll treat him for shock and keep him in for observation. I’ll send someone to clean and stitch this wound while I try to find him a bed.” The doctor nodded to a cubicle that was curtained off. “Wait in there and I’ll send someone.”

Giles had to hold onto Wesley quite hard as they wheeled Gunn away. 

“They have to operate, Wesley,” Willow said gently. “Gunn needs some surgery, but then they’ll bring him back. Why don’t you sit back down in here and wait for him?” 

Thinking of how ill the young man had looked, Giles wasn’t at all sure that there was going to be a living human being to wait for. “Don’t promise him things that may not happen.”

“I’m just trying to accentuate the positive,” she murmured back.

They managed to get him to sit but he kept looking between them as if they were mistakes waiting to be rectified. Giles wondered if he was waiting for the moment when they would magically become the people he knew; Giles morphing into Angel and Willow into Fred; and then Gunn would come out of surgery and they could all climb back into Angel’s convertible and drive back to the Hyperion where Cordelia and Lorne would be waiting for them. Giles closed his eyes, finding the sarcasm withered into terrible pangs of pity at how much these two had lost. He didn’t even know Gunn except as a voice on the other end of the telephone when he called to consult with Angel or Wesley, but he found the thought of his dying too difficult to contemplate at present. It seemed impossible for Wesley to survive without at least one connection to the world he had lost.

An intern came by at last and tried out his bedside manner on Wesley for a while. “You’ve been in the wars, haven’t you? Can you tell me where it hurts? Can you follow my finger? Did you hit your head? I think a few stitches would probably be a good idea here…”

Wesley looked at him blankly, clearly deeming him another confusing irrelevance, before his gaze went back to the double doors through which Gunn had been wheeled. Wesley winced at the prick of the needle as the local anaesthetic was injected into his side but didn’t listen to the careful explanation the intern had made him of how he was going to numb his wound so he could stitch him up, how he would need to keep the wound clean, have the stitches removed in ten days. To Wesley, Giles suspected, none of those words had even presented themselves as human speech.

The intern had fetched Wesley’s records while waiting for the local anaesthetic to take place, frowning over them in some concern, coming back to feel Wesley’s head and neck, and glands, and try again to get him to follow his finger.

“He’s worried about Gunn,” Willow explained apologetically. “They’re very close.”

“Gunn?” The intern looked back on the file. “It says here that he was brought in by a Charles Gunn and a Cordelia Chase before – after he was shot.”

“Cordelia?” Wesley looked at the intern the first glimmer of interest. “Was she here?”

“A couple of years ago, with you…” The intern was talking to Wesley as if he were slightly deaf now, enunciating every word with extra care. “You were shot. Do you remember?”

“It was cold,” Wesley said. “There was morphine.”

“Well, this isn’t morphine. This is just to numb your side so I can stitch you up. Were you and your friend mugged?”

“I don’t know what happened to Gunn.” Wesley looked back at the double doors, the intern evidently of no further interest now he wasn’t talking about people that he knew. “We had our own assignments.” He gazed at the intern with the light of interest blinking back on again, the hope making him look unexpectedly vulnerable. “Is Cordelia here now?”

Willow looked as if she was perilously close to bursting into tears of sympathy. She tightened her grip on Wesley’s hand. “Cordy had to go, remember? But I think she wanted us to find you and Gunn. I think she made them send us to you.”

Wesley focused on her for the first time. “Willow? Is Angel here?”

“Just you and Gunn, Wesley,” Giles told him quietly. “The others are gone.”

Willow gave him a look of reproach but the man was confused enough by his lurch back from dead to living; he couldn’t see the point in befuddling him further with lies. 

“Gunn’s in surgery,” Giles continued firmly. “And you need to sit still while this young man stitches up your side.”

Wesley sat still, as far as Giles could tell, because there was no reason for him to fidget or move. He could see the double doors through which Gunn had been wheeled, and clearly intended to stay where he could keep looking at them until Gunn was wheeled back. Giles suspected that one could have stuck him with red-hot needles in the interim, with or without a local anaesthetic first, and he would barely have noticed. 

Willow fetched them tea from the dispensing machine, which was, of course, disgusting, but Giles was so thirsty that he drank it anyway. Wesley took one sip and then began to cough up blood in dark pungent clots, necessitating a panicky round of tests to which they had to accompany him, Giles feeling like a time-wasting fraud the whole time, knowing that the medical insurance Wesley had was useless as Wolfram & Hart would certainly never honour it, and that despite the clots of blood in their sputum trays, Wesley had no internal bleeding any more. Quentin Travers would never have given the stamp of approval to paying the medical fees of a disgraced ex-Watcher, especially one who had incurred his injuries while technically an employee of Wolfram & Hart, but Giles just handed over his credit card when the insurance showed up as ‘cancelled’ on the computer and told them to take for Gunn’s bills as well; the Watchers’ Council of Great Britain would cover it.

The only things the Watchers’ Council of Great Britain had in abundance at present was money and Slayers. He decided that they owed Wesley for the childhood their traditions had stolen from him and owed Gunn just because the man had been doing their job when most of them had been enjoying a brandy in the library back in London while he had been sleeping on the streets. He had told them in no uncertain terms that he was not prepared to take on the whole administration of the organization, nor was he ready to take on another Slayer, not yet. Let the Slayers train the Slayers, he had suggested; the ones who had seen action teaching those who were still so new to their powers. He was tired, and needed a sabbatical – twelve months off to recover from the long years of strain.

They had agreed, of course. Giles was important now, ironically enough, simply by virtue of having field experience and not being dead. They wanted to keep him sweet where once they had not cared if they fired him. His expertise was invaluable, his eccentricities tolerated. He had fled to the coven and tried to adapt to a life that was different from the one he had known for so many years; coming to realize, belatedly, that there was an existence for him that could be enjoyable that did not revolve around Buffy, that administration bored him senseless, that he missed being in the field, that he was very glad to see Willow when she arrived after her time in Tibet; that Andrew would probably always be an idiot but at least now that Giles had escaped to Wiltshire, he was only an idiot by phone and fax instead of in person. He missed Buffy and Dawn as he might his own children, and worried about Xander, who sent them emails from cyber cafés in far-flung places. The boy was undergoing the grieving process by trying to keep one step ahead of it, as if he could outrun the place where Anya wasn’t any more, if he just kept moving. And yet, he did seem calm and at times almost…wise in the emails he sent back. If he was running away from reality, he was at least doing it in a way that was providing him with a lot of insight into other cultures.

He had not been exactly surprised about the break-up between Willow and Kennedy. Grief was a strange thing and all relationships founded upon it were in danger of having been constructed on very rocky foundations. Willow had found herself again, somewhere in Tibet, and found that a relationship wasn’t something she was ready for yet, after all, even one with someone who loved her. He had felt sorry for both of them, for Kennedy, who really did love Willow in her own way, yet had never before not been able to have anything that she wanted. For Willow who had perhaps been vulnerable and overwhelmed by Kennedy’s certainty that they belonged together at a time when her own judgement was something she no longer trusted, and yet who now found herself in need of more space than such a passionate and strong-willed woman could provide.

“But I’m good for her…” Kennedy had protested tearfully to Giles. “I can take care of her. I can help her be who she is…”

Although he privately agreed that Kennedy had been very good for Willow he couldn’t think of much to say that was comforting. “She needs to do it alone,” Giles said gently. “It’s nothing you’ve done or failed to do, Kennedy. It’s just…bad timing.”

Kennedy had gone to Cleveland to help Faith train the new Slayers, quieter and bruised inside. Willow had been her first true love. Giles wondered if someone falling in love with another human being who was still mourning a true love of their own could ever really believe that it wasn’t some deficiency on their part that made them fail to match up. He wondered if it would make Kennedy stronger inside or just more brittle to have given her heart so completely to someone who had held it very tenderly for a while before gently giving it back. He realized, with more than a pang of guilt, that he was not sorry to be excused for a while the emotional highs and lows of a group of teenage girls. The memories of Buffy’s teenage years – even the painful times – were precious to him, and he wouldn’t have given them up for anything, but he was glad, all the same, that Willow was twenty-five now, and the witches at the coven all even older.

The ultrasound the meticulous intern used to check Wesley’s lungs confounded everyone except Willow and Giles; confused doctors peering at a scan that showed blood clots in number yet no wound. Wesley was sedated, had a tube put down his throat, and the blood was suctioned out carefully, revealing healthy lungs which showed no sign of trauma. Hooked up to machinery as he was, they had to admit that Wesley’s blood pressure was normal, that his body seemed to be showing no signs of suffering from a wound that would explain the blood. They decided to keep him in for observation, wheeling him into a room containing two beds, the other one put ready for a now post-operative Gunn. Giles didn’t know who had pulled off the miracle that meant Wesley and Gunn could share a room, too dumbfounded to enquire at first, he was just incredibly grateful.

It was only later, after Gunn had been wheeled in out of post-op and hooked up to all kinds of machinery in a bed next to Wesley’s, that the hospital administrator had walked in and mentioned something about Angel Investigations having helped her in the past. How she wouldn’t usually do something like this, but she and her child would be dead if it weren’t for them, how heroes deserved preferential treatment if anyone did.

Giles was ashamed to realize, after she had gone, that he had never once thought of Wesley Wyndam-Pryce as a ‘hero’ until that woman had said it so casually; as if, of course that was what he and Gunn were, men set apart by selfless deeds. As he sipped another foul-tasting cup of tea and waited for Gunn to wake up, Giles realized that was exactly what they were, and why they were here, and why it was, therefore, that these two men, one of whom he didn’t know, and the other of whom he had never liked, were now his responsibility – because there was no one else left in the world to take care of them, and the world owed them more than it could probably ever repay.

***  
Harrogate Part Two

Willow sipped yet another cup of hospital dispensing machine tea and reminded herself that it would be an abuse of magic to make it drinkable. She looked across at Gunn again, just checking that his chest was still rising and falling the way it was meant to. They had given up trying to get Wesley to stay in his bed. She had used reason and understanding and Giles had used exasperation and Wesley had just looked through them until they stopped making that incomprehensible and irrelevant noise, and then returned once more to the chair by Gunn’s bed. If he was left unattended he lay down on the bed next to Gunn and curled up next to him. The last time it had happened the nurse had told them they would have to be separated if Wesley couldn’t restrain himself. Today, Wesley had fallen asleep in the uncomfortable visitor’s chair his head resting on his arms slumped half onto Gunn’s bed. 

She suspected that some part of Wesley was still in the process of making its way back from the Other Side. At least she hoped it was on its way, because his perception of reality, not to mention time, didn’t seem to have made the trip back with him. He kept looking at things over their shoulders, giving half-smiles of recognition to things that weren’t there. She didn’t know if he was remembering the past or was just in a whole ‘I see dead people’ place. She missed Xander. 

The guilt kicked in a second after that thought because she knew Kennedy was probably missing her right now, and yet she was missing Xander. She wanted someone to discuss this situation with who wouldn’t either obsess about Angel and what had happened to him, ask questions she couldn’t answer about what it all meant, or be so weighed down with guilt and responsibility that he was turning grey with it. Someone who made inappropriate jokes and performed small acts of unexpected kindness. Someone who wasn’t in Africa right now. 

She had called Buffy, of course, to tell her the little they knew. Buffy had offered to come back from Italy but Willow hadn’t really seen the point of the girl flying all this way to keep her company in a hospital room for two sick people that Buffy didn’t really know, or in the case of Wesley, really didn’t like that much either. The conversation had been awkward, Buffy trying so hard not to make this All About Angel, but ultimately, that was where her interest lay. Had Angel survived? Had Spike? Had Gunn any memory of what had happened in that alley? Had Wesley said anything that might cast some light on what had become of Angel? Had the vision sent to Willow explained where Angel was now? The answer to all of those questions was ‘I don’t know’ and Willow couldn’t really see the point in Buffy making a trip of several thousand miles just to be told that no one knew anything in person. The call was unsatisfactory, both of them so full of love for one another and yet knowing they weren’t giving the other person what they needed from this conversation. Willow couldn’t wave a magic wand and produce Angel, alive and well, and preferably human, and Buffy couldn’t truly care as much for a man she didn’t really know and a man she didn’t really like as she could for a trusted ally who had ultimately proved himself to be a soldier for the army of Good and the vampire she loved.

“I’ll come if you want,” Buffy had said, gently, but the trouble was that it would be as a favour to Willow, and Willow found herself suddenly in need of someone who would come because of Wesley and Gunn, not because of her.

Calling Faith in Cleveland was an impulse she couldn’t really have explained, she just found herself dialling the number and it mattering out of all proportion that it should be Faith and not Wood who picked up the phone. Not that she didn’t like Wood, of course she did. A part of her was still disappointed that it was Faith he had ended up with instead of Buffy, who had seemed to need a nice relatively normal guy so much more. But he didn’t know Wesley or Gunn. Faith was the only person whose telephone number she possessed who had met them, worked with them; who might, conceivably, care whether they lived or died. 

The phone rang and rang and then finally a familiar voice said in a sing-song: “Wood and Lehane Slayer Babysitting Service, how may I help you?”

Willow gripped the phone tighter in sheer relief. “Faith, it’s Willow. I have some bad news…”

Faith turned out to be exactly the right person to have called. She was the one who asked after Wesley and Gunn as if they mattered as more than a conduit to information about Angel. She asked about Angel as well, of course, but she seemed to care almost as much about them.

“Do you want me to come? Would it help? 

Willow had never thought that she would find Faith a comforting person to talk to, but today she was. She reluctantly told her that, no, she wasn’t needed yet, that they didn’t know where to begin to look for Angel and the impression she’d gotten was that he wasn’t their concern, the Powers were looking out for him, but it was difficult; the unexpected urge to say ‘Please, come’ was very strong.

“Are you looking for Angel?”

“I can’t risk a summoning spell – even if I had the power to send one across dimensions, which I don’t think I do.”

“Hey, you got Wes and Gunn back from the dead. That’s probably enough for one day’s work. How’s Buffy taking the news?”

“She said she can’t do it any more. Deal with not knowing if people are or aren’t gone forever.” Her voice hitched a little because she had so hated being the one who had to tell Buffy that Angel was possibly dead again and that Spike was possibly dead, too, only this time no one had seen either of them die who was conscious, and so for all she knew they were dust in a rainswept alley or suffering in a hell dimension, half-deafened by the screams of all their victims, or in another time and another place doing something else entirely. She had thought that they were ‘needed’, that was the word that had flashed into her mind, like information received, all the time she was being swamped by images of Wesley dying in the arms of a woman she knew was already dead, and dragons winging their way over the streets of LA.

Faith said: “If Gunn makes it or if he doesn’t, you need to take Wesley away from LA. You know that, right? Too much shit went down in that town. Get Giles to take him somewhere else. Somewhere…green.” 

Willow gripped the phone tighter in relief at hearing another human voice that asked the right questions and said the right things and wasn’t exhausted or insane. She knew there was nothing left to say, really, but this connection with Faith was the nearest thing she had come to feeling normal again.

Faith said awkwardly: “You want to talk to Kennedy?”

“Not really.” Willow grimaced. “I think it’s better…this way, because of the awkward silences and not knowing what to say to each other and…stuff.”

“Is Gunn gonna make it?”

Willow looked over at the bed where Gunn was lying so very still, but the monitors were bleeping a reassuring rhythm. “The doctors think he’s going to be okay. It was close but… I just wish he’d wake up. He may be able to talk to Wesley, which would be good, because when Wesley looks at us and when he looks at the vending machine I’m not seeing a whole lot of difference, and it’s kind of disconcerting when someone treats like you’re a diet Pepsi he never asked for, if you know what I mean.”

“You sure you don’t want me to come? I could look for the green guy. What about Connor? Was he in the alley?”

“I don’t think so. Wesley doesn’t know. Wesley doesn’t really know anything right now except that Gunn nearly died and Angel and the others aren’t here. No, actually, he doesn’t know that either, because sometimes I think he thinks they are here, and he has conversations with them – which is more than he does with me or Giles.”

Another pause before Faith said in a rush: “I’d come. I’d come right now, but if Wes is confused and getting the past mixed up with the present he might think I was there to…hurt him… But I’ll come anyway if you think it will help.”

It would help me. Willow had no idea why she was so sure of that, but she knew it all the same. She forced herself to say instead: “No, it’s fine. We’re just waiting for Gunn to wake up. Then we’ll decide what to do next.” That was the point where she should really be saying ‘Goodbye’ and putting down the phone, but she kept the connection open, hoping Faith might say something else.

“Hey, did you get your memories of Connor back out of the blue too?”

“Yeah, that was so weird. I didn’t know it and then I’d always known it. Like with Dawn. Only this time I actually felt it happen which was kind of…creepy – being able to remember not remembering. I think the spell must have ended when Cyrus Vail died or when the Senior Partners decided Angel had broken his contract. I hope Connor’s okay.” 

“Well, the kid is super human. And, even if he wasn’t, if he’s got his memories back and he’s in any kind of trouble he should be able to open a phonebook and call one of us. Does Wes remember him too?” 

“I don’t know. Like I said, to him we’re the coke the soda machine gives you when you’ve pushed it for root beer.” She glanced across at where Wesley was slumped on Gunn’s bed, those horrendous circles of shadow under his eyes and all the stubble on his jaw that he hadn’t shaved in days, his hair looking like it hadn’t been combed for a week. No one could have looked less at peace than him or more in need of a rest. She remembered the agonizing splinter of pain Buffy’s voice had embedded in her heart as she sang so purely and with such anguish of how she had been, before her resurrection, not in a hell dimension, but in heaven.

She realized what she had been waiting to say, lowering her voice to whisper: “I don’t know if I did the right thing. I was so sure. I didn’t have any doubts. But when I did it to Buffy it was wrong. What if I was wrong?”

“Bringing Wes back?” Faith sounded so certain, so strong. “I don’t know if it was ‘right or wrong’, Willow, I never was too sure about any of that shit, I’m just glad you did it. Give me a choice between someone I care about lying on a slab or walking and talking I’m going for walking and talking every time. Aren’t you? And maybe Buffy was happy in heaven but she ain’t exactly miserable here, is she? I mean have you seen that guy she’s screwing?”

Willow laughed, wondering in shock as she did it how long it had been since the last time she had laughed about…anything. 

“You sure you’re okay?” Faith asked, a little awkwardly. “You sound so fuckin’ tired.”

“You should see Giles.” Willow realized she felt better; not just better, felt like…Willow. She had separated herself into strands, atoms, glittering pieces of perspective, while on that higher plane and come back complete and yet with a stronger sense than she had known for years that she had no idea what she wanted to do next. She knew who she was and yet she had no idea where she fitted into the scheme of things. Perhaps that was why she had been so grateful for that sense of certainty that had come to her when she knew she had to go to LA; being set a task she could perform. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next.”

She had certainly not intended to say that aloud but Faith didn’t seem surprised. She snorted an agreement. “Hey, you and me both. Try waking up from a killing and torturing spree to find you’re still not dead and now you have all this new shit to live around as well as the old shit.”

“Been there, done that,” Willow said softly.

She could imagine Faith grimacing, could hear her muttering ‘fuck’ under her breath, and found it oddly comforting. “Sorry, I forgot I wasn’t the only chick in Sunnydale to go ape.”

“Think we can blame it on the whole Hellmouthy experience?”

“I think you can, not so sure it works for me. I was pretty fucked up before I got there and I did some bad stuff in LA as well. Most of it to Wes. One day at a time, eh?”

Willow smiled. “Hello, my name’s Willow, and I’m a magiholic.”

“ ‘On reaching this step, we have admitted our prior life has been out of control and we have not received the internal peace and external success we have been seeking. With this prayer we are asking our higher power to remake us into another and changed person.’ ” There was some mockery in Faith’s voice but less than Willow would have expected.

“You can say it from memory?”

“In prison they can find you an AA meeting, not so easy with the rogue slayer support group. It’s someone around to nod in the right places, you know? I just changed it so it was drink that made me do those things instead of… you know – being a freak of nature.” There was a pause before she said: “I get why Angel used to think about what he did. You’ve gotta know that inside that’s still who you are and you could do those things again. All you’d have to do is start thinking it was okay because those dumb rules that apply to everyone else, they don’t apply to you.”

Willow found herself nodding in agreement. “And maybe sometimes you have to have a lot to make up for before you just get on with doing good. Maybe it stops you thinking ‘Why me? Why am I having to do this? Why isn’t it someone else’s job instead?’

“I think that’s a Slayer thing,” Faith admitted. “You know you either go ‘fuck, this gig blows – why do I have to go out every night and scare myself stupid?’ or you go ‘what doesn’t rule about being stronger and faster and better than everyone else?’ Sometimes you do both at the same time and then you’re really screwed.”

“Are you telling all those baby Slayers that?” Willow giggled at the idea.

“I’m trying to dress it up a little – put a bow on it. It’s like ‘Hey, sometimes you’re not going to like being you, but that’s why we’re here to talk it through’. I’m the fun one, Kennedy’s the scary one, Buffy’s the had-the-sense-to-get-herself-off-to-Italy-and-screw-the-Immortal one – so, naturally Buffy’s the one they all want to be when they grow up.”

“Don’t they drive you crazy?”

“No, they’re okay. Some of them are from some pretty crappy backgrounds, so I identify with that. I think I’m doing some good here, maybe stopping a few of them from getting themselves killed on their first patrol, helping them not to make the same mistakes I did.”

There was a silence as they thought about Faith’s mistakes. It was strange to remember feeling such a hot rush of anger towards the person on the other end of the phone when now her feelings were so very different. “You’re not the only one to make mistakes. I flayed a man alive. Spike and Angel killed so many people even the Watchers’ Council lost count and those people know how to cross-reference.”

“That’s what’s got me worried about Angel. He’d have to save a lot of puppies to make up for all the shit he did, and what with the brooding and the rat eating and the moping around after Buffy, I don’t think he had time. Which means he could still be damned. I was thinking – there are some demon mages around here I could put the squeeze on. Some of them jump dimensions all the time so I could make it clear they found out where he was being held or I turned them inside out. Angel never gave up on me, maybe even when he should have done, when everyone else had, me included. If he’s trapped in a hell dimension...”

“I don’t think he’s in a hell dimension this time.”

“Is this the bedtime story we’re telling B or is this what you really think?”

Willow tried to remember the clarity of her thoughts as she had felt that first vision flowing through her, flooding her with information there was no time to properly assimilate. She closed her eyes and tried to chase that knowledge that had inhabited her so briefly and so absolutely. 

“He could be dead or he could be in a hell dimension. I don’t have any proof, but I think Angel and Spike and Illyria have been claimed as warriors for the Powers, and as warriors for the Powers they still have work to do. So, I don’t think they’re...dead-dead just undead. I think maybe the demons who had crimes to make amends for had to finish their work, whereas the humans didn’t have to make amends and were left behind to...” Rest. _Except now they can’t because you took that from them when you made them live, just like you took Buffy away from heaven when you brought her back...._

But Faith was following a very different train of thought, her voice a jolt of indignation on the other end of the line: “To die? Just because they weren’t demons? What kind of sick higher power decides you only get to live if you’ve killed enough people? How is that any kind of justice?”

She could hear an echo behind that voice, something being explained to her that she had forgotten even as it was told to her, meant to forget because all she needed to remember was that she had to go to LA, go now, find Wesley, and bring him back. She lowered her voice so that Wesley wouldn’t hear her: “If I say I think it was Cordelia who sent us to save Wesley and Gunn, do I sound crazy?”

“No,” Faith said with such certainty that Willow almost caught her conviction. “Why would you?”

“Because I don’t think Wesley’s at home to Mr Sane at the moment and I think he thinks it too.”

“Hey, someone must have sent you and it sounds like Cordelia’s kind of gig to me. Wes and Cordy were tight – had that whole brother-sister thing going. When he used to come and see me, Angel was always telling me about their dumb little fights; he said it was like having kids, like it was this pain in the ass he had to put up with, but you wouldn’t believe how happy he looked when he talked about them. He was so fuckin’ proud of them, you know? Would have been funny except it wasn’t. It really wasn’t.”

There was a painful pause as they both thought about Angel, Willow remembering that rain swept alley that might or might not contain his last dustly remains. “Thank you,” Willow said awkwardly. “I think I really needed someone to talk to.”

“Hey, any time. I mean that. And keep me posted about Wes and Gunn, will you? However it goes down I want to know what happens.”

“I promise.” 

When Willow put down the phone she felt better than she had since Wesley had been jolted back to life and she had found herself wondering if she had just done a terrible thing. She crossed over to the bed and gently touched his hair. “Wesley…?”

He gazed up at her out of those tortured-looking blue eyes. She couldn’t tell if he really didn’t recognize them, as Giles was thinking, or if it was just a case of finding them…irrelevant; there being people he was waiting for and they weren’t it. “Would you like some tea?” She thought about mentioning the crick he was going to get in his neck if he kept falling asleep with his head on Gunn’s bed but thought perhaps the tea was a better way to make him sit up straight. She offered him her own cup, not thinking he would care that much about germs.

He looked at it for a long moment before he took it and sipped at it. He said, “Thank you” as if he wasn’t absolutely sure if those were the right words. 

“You’re welcome.” She gave him what she hoped was an encouraging smile. “I spoke to Buffy. She says she hopes you get well soon. And Faith…”

He looked around in confusion. “Faith’s here?”

“No, but she could come if you like…?”

“Has she seen Angel?”

Willow sighed. Perhaps she should have asked Buffy to come after all. She and Wesley could sit in Gunn’s hospital room and obsess over Angel together. “No.”

“I think he was here before. Cordelia wasn’t going to tell me.” He looked back at the man on the bed. “Illyria came in earlier.”

She just knew that Giles would be insisting that she told Wesley he was wrong, ensuring that he started to separate the past and the present in his tangled mind. Instead she said brightly: “Oh, really?”

“She said Gunn was pleasing to her eyes.”

Looking back at the sleeping man, Willow thought Illyria had a point. “Well, I would think he would be – to anyone’s eyes, really. He’s very handsome.”

Wesley gazed at the man intently and then sighed as if the task was beyond him. “I don’t think I could ever see any of us the way that she did – from so very far away. He just looks like Gunn to me. Illyria looks like…what she isn’t any more.”

She rested a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry about Fred.”

“It’s the difference between consumed and destroyed. It’s the difference between never being herself again on any plane, and being part of what’s restored the day Illyria cracks apart.” He blinked as he focused on Willow, seeming surprised to find her here, as if she had used up her allotted time yet lingered still. “Do you think it’s blue?”

“What?” Willow asked in confusion.

“The colour of a human soul?”

She thought of a milky swirl in a glass orb. “It’s white. Like a cloud.”

“All souls or just Angel’s?”

That was a tricky one. She tried to remember. “Angel’s is the only soul I’ve ever seen, on account of most people not keeping theirs in jars.”

Wesley felt his chest and looked down at intently. “Do I still have mine?”

“Do you feel as if you…don’t…?”

He gazed into her eyes, his oddly calm within the shadows that surrounded them. “I feel empty.”

“I don’t think that’s the place where your soul was. I think that’s the place where your friends used to be. I think you’re missing them.”

“Yes.” He gazed straight through her. “I would think I probably am.”

She bit her lip. “You’re not alone, Wesley. I know you don’t know us very well but Giles and I – we’ve both lost people that we love. We know what that’s like.”

For the first time he seemed to focus on her properly and she wondered just how many weeks of sleep he was going to need before he looked normal. “It’s like being dead while you’re still alive.” 

When his attention passed from her it was like a light winking off. She was still gasping for a breath he had knocked out of her lungs, trying to tell herself he was just describing grief, the terrible numbness of days with no light in them, that overwhelming absence; that this was nothing she had done to him.

He gave her back the polystyrene cup of tea and took Gunn’s hand in his, holding it against his chest, against the place where he had worried that his soul no longer was, gazing unblinkingly at the man’s face as he waited for him to wake up.

***

Gunn opened his eyes and got stabbed by way too much light. He squeezed them shut, wondering if anyone had gotten the number of the truck that had clearly backed over him a couple of dozen times. No, more likely a demon. Or a vampire. He clasped a hand to his neck and felt for a pulse. He couldn’t feel one but perhaps he wasn’t looking in the right place. He didn’t feel like a vampire. He felt like Charles Gunn…only a version of himself that had been run over by a truck.

“Gunn…?” 

Wesley’s voice. And behind it the sound of those machines they hooked you up to in the hospital. Except this was the wrong way round. Wes was the one who got hooked up to the machinery. Gunn was the one stuck in the uncomfortable chair waiting for him to wake up and – 

A rain drenched alley in the middle of the night. Spike and Angel standing there, soaking and bleeding, but looking ready for whatever the demon world might throw at them. Spike telling Wolfram & Hart to bring it on despite the blood pouring down his face and Angel looking as close to peace as Gunn had seen in a long time, because after this there really was nothing but silence and they’d made a difference; in the teeth of the corruption Wolfram & Hart had represented, still, they’d made a difference. Gunn feeling his strength running out like sand through a sieve, but also feeling like himself again, the guy that kicked vampire ass.

_Damn! How did I know the fang boys would pull through? You're lucky we're on the same side, dogs, 'cause I was on fire tonight. My game was tight._

_You're supposed to wear the red stuff on the inside, Charlie boy._

_Any word on Wes?_

_Illyria dropping from the sky, dripping with rainwater, shaking with anger and grief._

_Wesley's dead._

He opened his eyes, blinking as the light made them water. A Wesley-shaped blur gazed back at him anxiously. Another blink and he was streaked with clarity. Unwashed hair, unshaven jaw, racoon eyes from what look like a week without sleep, the shock of all that blue. Yeah, that was Wes. He looked like every kind of crap but he didn’t look dead.

“Wes…?” Gunn had to swallow hard before he could make the words climb past the sandpaper in his throat. “Illyria said you were dead.”

“I was.”

“Dear Lord…” 

A voice he didn’t recognize from some other English guy and a little squeak that sounded decidedly feminine. Gunn reached up to touch Wesley’s face, wanting to feel for himself if he was real and warm, and noticed the way the back of his hand was blurry as well as having some kind of tubing stuck into it. 

He touched Wesley’s face and the man moved his head into the warmth of Gunn’s hand. His skin felt the way it always did, the roughness of the stubble, the angle of his cheekbone. Wesley closed his eyes, like one of those exotic cats he half-resembled, putting dignity aside for a moment to enjoy being petted. Wesley clasped his hand over Gunn’s and for a moment Gunn could feel the warmth of Wesley’s palm and the texture of his stubble on either side of his hand, and yet…

“Are you a ghost?” he breathed.

“I could be.” Wesley inclined his head cautiously at the other two, adding confidentially: “I don’t think they’re real.”

“Gunn. How are you feeling?”

Gunn freed his hand gently and focused with difficulty on a tweedy-looking guy with intense green eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. “Better than I was expecting, seeing as the last thing I remember is bleeding to death while facing fifty thousand slavering demons.”

“You remember?” 

He recognized the redhead. Willow from Sunnydale. The one who’d ensouled Angel that time when Cordelia had been taken over by a higher power and she and Connor – Christ, Connor. Fred holding a baby, Lorne singing lullabies, him and Fred looking everywhere for Wes after Justine left him for dead. Connor turned into the world’s most difficult teenager. Cordy with an evil bun in the oven who had turned out to be Jasmine. Jasmine. All the warm fuzzy love that was just another lie. He’d forgotten it. All of it. Until this moment. He had to snatch a breath to try to get himself steady. “Yeah. I remember. Any word on Angel?”

“We were hoping you could tell us.” She smiled at him in relief. “We’re so glad you’re awake. Aren’t we, Wesley?” 

He wondered why she was using that ‘talking to the crazy guy’ voice on Wesley and then remembered him skittering around his office in his socks and guessed she probably had reason. 

“What about the demons? Are they all over LA? Angel, Spike and Illyria got game, no question, but they weren’t going to hold them longer than a few minutes.”

The English guy shook his head. “There was no sign of them either.”

“Were you dead too?” Wesley was still gazing at him intently. Gunn wished he’d go ahead and blink.

“I don’t think so. Last thing I remember is a dragon the size of a jetplane screaming overhead, Spike telling the demons to try and take him if they could, Illyria saying she wanted to do more violence, and Angel shoving me behind him. Then it’s swirly white light time and next thing I know I’m here.”

Wesley looked a little disappointed. “You didn’t see Cordelia?”

Willow gazed at him anxiously. “Did you see her, Wesley?”

“She said she was sorry.”

Gunn was grateful for the cup of ice chips the other English guy handed him, the chill of them soothing his aching throat although nothing was touching that road drill in his head short of a bottle of aspirin. He let one ice chip slip down slowly, glad of that cool melt against his hot throat. “You’re talking about when she came to Wolfram & Hart, right? When we thought she was out of the coma but she was really already dead?” Wesley didn’t answer him and Gunn caught Willow’s eye, grimacing apologetically in Wesley’s direction. If it was squirrelly time for Wes again it was just as well he’d woken up before someone carted him off to the funny farm. “Is Lorne around?”

“He wasn’t in the alley where we found you,” the English guy told him. “Rupert Giles, by the way.”

Gunn shook hands with him awkwardly around the various drips going in and out of his veins. “Oh, yeah, we spoke on the phone. Buffy’s Watcher?”

Giles looked at Wesley uncomfortably. “One of them, yes. I need to call for a nurse. The doctors will want to see you.”

“Why don’t we wait outside for a minute, Wesley?” Willow said in that bright upbeat voice. 

Gunn caught Giles’s arm before the man headed after them. “How long was I out?”

“About twenty-four hours. We brought you in last night.”

“And there’s no word on Angel and the others?”

“I’m sorry, no.”

“How come Wesley ain’t dead? Not that I’m complaining. I’m just wondering…? Did Illyria get it wrong or…?”

Giles looked as if he expected a row but was going to tough it out anyway. “He was technically dead when we found him but Willow brought him back. She felt that a higher power wanted her to do so and the magical assistance was lent to her for that purpose.”

“Cordy.” Gunn felt the relief flood through him. He’d been almost afraid to believe it despite the evidence of his own eyes, worried this was just a dream and then he’d wake up back in that alley with those demons coming and Wesley still dead. But Cordelia deciding to interfere made perfect sense – a lot more sense, in fact, than her not interfering. “I guess those Higher Powers figured they owed her another one. Did Willow save me too – cause I should probably thank her for that?”

“She did what she could and I think she may have bought you some time but she had very little power left after resurrecting Wesley. The surgeons here were the ones who saved your life. And I really do need to call for a doctor.”

Gunn let him go but said: “Is Wes…okay…?”

And that wasn’t a happy face from Giles. “He seems to know who you are. He was very…concerned for you. He’s obviously distressed about the disappearance of Angel and the others of your group and he still seems to be mourning the loss of Miss Burkle.”

“Adjustment.” Gunn thought of that guy in the office with the books and papers everywhere, obsessing over Illyria. 

“What?”

“He said that was what it was. Him being…you know…like this.” 

“Well, to the uninformed observer it could look like…clinical insanity. They keep running tests and they can’t find a head injury. I think they’d be relieved if they could.”

“He just needs time.” Gunn thought about how much time it would probably take and winced. “Although adjusting to a world that doesn’t revolve around Angel. Realistically speaking, that could take Wes…forever.”

Giles reached across and clasped Gunn briefly on the shoulder. “We really are very pleased that you made it, Gunn.”

The man went off in search of a doctor and Gunn found himself gazing at the ceiling of a hospital room. He had been ready to die. There had even been a kind of peace at the end, knowing this was it, his last battle, and he was going to go out swinging. It had felt like the right time to die, for all of them. Not Cordy and not Fred. They’d been guilty of nothing and that had just been tragic, and Lorne had been guiltless of anything except crimes against fashion, but the rest of them had all done things…things they could never put right, and Wes was so tired and fucked up, and this was their chance to make some amends and have a brief blaze of glory and get some rest. And now here he was, still alive, full of morphine, and with Fred still dead and Wes still crazy at least partly because of him. He thought he was grateful, on the whole, more grateful than not, and perhaps he’d get more grateful when he had a little time to think about it, but there was a part of him that was also wondering where the hell he went from here?

“If this is your idea, Cordy,” he murmured as he heard the doctor hurrying towards him, “I hope you know what you were doing.”

***

She had been secretly helping Gunn to heal. Willow couldn’t see how that was in any way a misuse of magic. If there had been enough power when they had found him in the alley she would have done a great deal more than repair enough of his flesh to turn him from mortally wounded to critically injured. After a couple of days for them all to recover, she had her strength back and Gunn was just lying there, alive, but having to be on morphine for a wound that still had so much healing to do, and it was going to be months of recovery for him, wheelchairs and pain every time he had to bend or turn and…

She had given him a little healing help the night before, working from within so that the surface wound looked the same but inside the deep layers of stitched and bruised skin were gently repaired. This morning she had waited for the nurse to come and go, letting them change the dressing on Gunn’s wound before she moved over to mend some more of his traumatized flesh.

She slipped her fingers through his. He had long sensitive fingers, not what one might expect of a demon killer. Wesley’s were the same although the two men were very different in other ways. Gunn was more athletic-looking, with broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist whereas Wesley was narrow all over. And, of course, there was the fact of Gunn being about eight feet tall. She could see how useful Gunn would have been in all those many fights; what a difference it must have made to Wesley and Cordelia when he arrived, someone to bridge the physical gap between Angel and the two fragile humans. In the same way that Riley, without being as strong as Buffy, had still been stronger than any of the rest of them. She remembered how much safer she had felt when going on patrol with Riley, even if his approach could be kind of tiresome, with all the emphasis on military hand signals and co-ordinated flank attacks and so on; graveyards had still felt like less scary places when they were accompanied by Riley and Buffy. So, she could imagine how Wesley had felt as if someone had lifted a burden from him when Gunn had turned up; someone else to do the fighting as well as him and Angel; someone who understood the limitations of human strength. She closed her eyes and concentrated, connecting to him, to his wound, to the tissue that needed to heal, the skin that needed to grow, the bruises that could be soothed away so gently…

“I’ve received some bad news, Willow.”

She jumped guiltily as Giles came back into the room, snatching her hand away from Gunn’s as though they were teenagers caught canoodling in a math class. “I was just…” Then she saw his face and hurried over to him. “What’s happened?”

Giles was looking impossibly weary. “My god-daughter, Alicia, has been…murdered. Rather horribly.”

“Oh, Giles, I’m so sorry.”

“She’s the daughter of Miranda, at the coven, who isn’t satisfied with the police’s efforts. She’s asked me to go and investigate it as soon as possible.”

She thought of Miranda, a small fair woman with a birdlike precision of movements, who was always calm and never judged. One of the witches who had tried not to show the anxiety she had undoubtedly felt when Willow had first been brought to them; who had forced herself to smile and offer cups of tea and flapjacks, instead of flinching in fear. She thought of Miranda refilling the herbs in the kitchen, the way she always did, trying to be normal and a rock for everyone else, because that was her self-appointed task, to be the calm one, the coper, and then breaking down, sobbing and sobbing. Alicia had been her only child. Her photographs had been on the corkboard in the kitchen, a toddler with a bucket and spade in her hand, and a plump pretty girl of fourteen with flyaway fair hair, shielding her eyes against the sun by a sea wall somewhere. There had been a later one of her somewhere else, looking awkward in her graduation gown. Willow looked at the mask of grief on Giles’ face and tried to think what she could do to help the most. “I’m so sorry. What can I…? Do you want to fly straight back? I can stay and take care of Wesley and Gunn while…?”

He looked at Wesley, who was, for once, asleep in his own bed, and Gunn who was still sleeping to the purring and bleeping background rhythm of the machines to which he was attached. “I don’t think that’s an option. Wesley must be in serious danger of getting committed if no one is willing to take responsibility for his care, and Gunn is going to be in a wheelchair for weeks. I think the only solution is to take them to England with us. It would solve the problem of the scenery change that Wesley needs, and it would get them away from any enemies they have in this city who may be looking to get even. They’re certainly too vulnerable to leave here, given Gunn’s physical condition and Wesley’s mental one.”

Willow gazed across at Wesley. “I think he’s waiting for Angel.”

“Angel isn’t coming back.”

“He did before.”

“And he may again, but it won’t be to what it was before. Even if Angel is disgorged from whatever hell dimension or higher plane he may currently be inhabiting he can’t magically put Wesley’s life back together. They can’t go back to the Hyperion and make it be how it was before. Cordelia is dead, Winifred Burkle is dead, and Wesley is no longer sane. I think the sooner he gets away from this place and stops thinking about the past and looking toward the future, the quicker he will get well again. And I hope Gunn will agree with me.”

 

Gunn had agreed with him. And, if asked, he would have never expected to – let some English guy he didn’t know and who had never had any time for Wes walk into their lives and tell them this was how it was going to be? No way in hell. But this was more complicated than that. Gunn could feel the necessity of shedding their old lives as quickly as possible. The Senior Partners were probably not going to be forgiving them any time soon for what they’d done to the LA branch of Wolfram & Hart or the Circle of the Black Thorn. With Angel, Illyria, and Spike whisked out of reach there was only him and Wes left to take their payback, and neither of them was well enough to pick up an axe right now. And there were too many ghosts in this city: Alonna, Cordelia, Fred; every sister he’d ever had by birth or adoption had died here. Maybe if they stuck around Anne would end up dead as well. 

He felt chewed up and spat out and in need of a change. He was almost grateful that his wound had been so serious that there was no question of him being able to take charge. He could put the responsibility onto Giles and not feel like a shirker. It wasn’t his fault his guts had been ripped open and he didn’t have energy enough to walk across a room right now. He needed someone to look doctors in the eye and tell them Wes was going to be taken care of, he was going to get help, and someone was assuming responsibility for him who wasn’t hooked up to a morphine drip. Giles was willing to do that. Maybe he was only doing it out of a sense of duty or guilt, and not cause he cared about Wes as a friend, but it was still someone stepping up to the plate and taking responsibility, and right now Gunn was grateful. And, yeah, he just knew that give it a month or so, he was going to be resentful as hell about Giles thinking he knew what was best for Wes and telling him what to do, but right now, he didn’t have the energy or the mental clarity to cope with Wesley twenty-four-seven and if Giles was willing to arrange everything and make the move happen, Gunn was willing to agree to whatever the guy said.

 

“I don’t want to leave LA.”

Wesley was refusing to meet everyone’s eye as he sat on his bed in the hospital room and acted out. He wasn’t enough himself to manage the whole passive aggressive shit he’d used to pull on Angel, but he was in that stubborn crazy place that meant reasoning with him was going to take a while. Gunn hoped he could stay awake until the end of it, because the morphine was pushing his eyes closed already. 

Giles already looked as if he was reaching for the last of his patience, and they’d only been doing this for ten minutes. “Wesley, I’m trying to keep you out of the mental institution to which you will undoubtedly be committed if someone doesn’t take responsibility for your health and well being. Now, Gunn, Willow and I are willing to do that but I absolutely can’t do it here. You need to come back to England and…get well. Once you’re well you can choose for yourself if you want to return to Los Angeles. Although, personally, I think you would be very ill advised to do so it will then be your choice, right now, it isn’t.”

“I need to wait for Angel.”

“Angel’s gone.” Having to deal with his own grief was making Giles all kinds of brutal and, looking at Willow, Gunn saw he wasn’t the only one wincing. Giles just kept going though: “Whether he’s dust, in hell, or ascended to a better place, he isn’t here and there is no guarantee that he ever will be again.”

“If he were dead he’d be with Cordelia and she hasn’t seen him.”

Giles raised his eyes to heaven as if seeking patience. Gunn figured that if Wes had ever been allowed to be a normal kid, the kind that didn’t do what he was told sometimes – refused to pick up his toys or to stay in bed after lights out, instead of a child that had always been too busy trying to make Daddy love him to go through the usual rebellions, then he would have recognized the signs of an adult on his last nerve.

Giles spoke through gritted teeth: “Wesley, I’m not prepared to have this conversation with you any longer. I have too much to do. You all have apartments full of possessions and ridiculous amount of things still left in a hotel whose mortgage is no longer being paid. I have a dozen people I need to see and two dozen things I need to arrange to try to get your possessions into a storage facility and the two of you out of this country without being killed or arrested. And I have to tell you that if you had renewed your visa even once in the past four years that task would be considerably easier.”

“Call David Nabbit.” Gunn reached for a pen, wondering how even that action could feel so strange. Willow hurried to supply him with a pad of paper, a pen, and an encouraging smile that made him feel a little like a toddler trying to take its first steps. He wrote down the number laboriously. “He owed Angel and he liked Cordy. He’s got lots of money and he knows how to tapdance around all kinds of red tape. Explain the situation and ask him to help. This is his private number. He may be able to keep hold of the hotel just in case…” He looked across at Wesley. “You know…”

Giles took the number with an exhausted sigh. “Thank you.”

“When was the last time you slept?” Gunn winced at the shadows under his eyes. 

“I don’t remember.” He turned back to Wesley. “You have great gifts as a linguist. You have been extensively – and expensively – trained as a Watcher. That gives you a responsibility, Wesley, to use your skills in the fight against evil, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because, when you are yourself again, you will remember that your whole life has been dedicated to that cause. You cared about that fight before you ever met Angel, and you will care about it again in the future. For the moment, your judgement is not something that you can trust so I am asking you to rely upon mine. Either way you will be coming to England with us.”

Willow gave him another apologetic wince as Giles picked up his coat and strode out of the room. Gunn guessed that Giles wasn’t usually that abrasive but his grief at what had happened to his god-daughter and his frustration at being in LA when he wanted to be back in England lending some help was making him a lot more ornery than he would usually have been. At least Gunn hoped the guy wasn’t usually this crabby, or living with him in England was going to be all kinds of not-fun. He sighed. “Wes, Giles just lost someone he cares about. You and me both know how that feels. Just come to England with us and get well and then we’ll worry about what we’re going to do next, okay?”

Wesley looked at the floor. “I want to stay in LA.”

Gunn tried to move and the pain jolted through him. “Well, you can’t,” he heard himself snapping. He wondered how on edge his temper was right now, what with the pain and the sickening sense of failure, and maybe his resentment at not being dead, after all, of being forced to fight more battles when he’d thought his particular war was over. He sighed and closed his eyes, unable to fight off the exhaustion any longer. “Wes, just do as you’re damned well told, will you? I’m too tired to deal with you right now.”

***

Illyria was the most frequent visitor in the hospital. Today had been so stressful that Wesley was more than usually pleased to see her, even if she was somewhat inclined to stalk around the small hospital room like a hungry leopard on the lookout for an antelope. The morning had been taken up with everyone talking at him at once, Giles telling him lots of things he hadn’t wanted to hear about what was being done about the Hyperion and their remaining possessions and their passports, and the trip to England that Giles was insisting that they took as soon as Gunn was well enough to travel. Willow had chimed in with lots of chirpy little smiles that were evidently meant to reassure him but just made him more and more convinced that she was probably some sort of astral projection. Problematic and emotionally and mentally exhausting as Illyria’s visits could be, today she was a welcome distraction from the panic he felt whenever he thought about leaving LA. She walked around Gunn’s bed as he was sleeping, examining him curiously from all angles.

“I am content that he is restored. His wound was mortal when we faced the demon hordes of the Wolf, Ram and Hart together.”

Wesley couldn’t answer her when there were other people watching, but if Willow was busy meditating and Giles went out to fetch more of the undrinkable tea from the dispensing machine they could have a conversation. He was assuming the tea was undrinkable because it came from a dispensing machine anyway. It could be part of having come back from the dead, some hell-punishment – fluid that tasted revolting however thirsty he was. There had been no solid evidence either way as yet as to whether or not this was really LA or just another outpost of hell. The only thing he absolutely knew for a fact was that the blow Cyrus Vail had struck him had been mortal and he had died. If this was an afterlife he was not sure how much energy he should logically expend upon it, but he was trying to interact with his surroundings with as much conviction as he could. It just sometimes seemed a somewhat pointless exercise. So far Giles and Willow had not noticed when Illyria joined them, but he was not sure if it was going to stay that way.

“I would have regretted his death. As I regretted yours. It caused me considerable pain.”

“It caused me quite a lot of pain, too,” Wesley pointed out. He gestured to her to lower her voice. “You can’t…declaim in here. You’ll wake Gunn.”

“I would have made those demons grovel before my majesty and cringe in terror of my wrath.”

“Of course you would. Illyria, do you know where Angel is?”

She shrugged dismissively. “The half-breed is no concern of mine.”

“But he’s a concern of mine. Please…? Have you seen him? Is he where…you are…? And where are you?”

She leaned across to run her fingers through Wesley’s hair, becoming Fred, a familiar, welcome pain in his heart as Illyria’s blue eyes became Fred’s brown ones, that smile he could have drawn from memory, before she pressed a kiss onto his forehead. “In your memories, of course, silly.” And then she was gone.

It was always a shock when she did that. She seemed so solid, and he could feel her lips against his skin, her fingers in his hair; and then she dissolved into light and air and there was nothing remaining of her. So far Gunn had not done any dissolving in front of him, but that didn’t mean the man was permanent fixture. It could be a hell torment of refined cruelty to make it seem as if Gunn was alive and with him, and then just snatch him back into shadow. It sounded like something that Wolfram & Hart would do to him. He wasn’t sure about Willow or Giles either. He often turned around and found them absent when he hadn’t heard them leave, and as for the way they used door handles and handed him cups of weak and bilious tea, Illyria sometimes visited for long periods of time and handled things during her stay. So did Cordelia.

“So, Wes…? Has the Blue Meanie gone?”

He turned to find Cordelia sitting on the end of Gunn’s bed. She looked wonderful. 

“You’ve grown your hair.”

She beamed at him. “I knew I’d get you trained up to notice things like that eventually. I’m trying out a new look. You need a wash and brush up, by the way. You’re starting to look a little sleeping-in-a-dumpster-not-so-chic.” She nodded to the bed, expression tender as she gazed at Gunn: “How’s our guy?”

“They say he’s going to be okay. Did you send me back?”

“Willow called you back. Maybe I helped a little. But it wasn’t your time.”

“I didn’t mind,” he admitted. “I was quite looking forward to a rest.”

She shrugged. “Sorry, Wes, no can do. You haven’t clocked enough field-time yet.”

“And you had? Cordelia, you were only twenty-four.”

She conceded the point. “I didn’t want to go.”

“We didn’t want to lose you. We miss you.”

“I know.” She took his hand in hers turning it over so she could look at his lifeline, tracing its contours with one immaculately manicured finger. “But some things can’t be changed. You weren’t meant to die when you did. I was.”

He was surprised by how perfect her hands were. “They have nail varnish in heaven?”

“Well, what kind of a heaven would it be without it?” she snorted. “You think I’d check into any afterlife where I couldn’t get a manicure?”

He gazed at her with longing, thinking how much easier it would be to just take Gunn’s hand and her hand, and go with her, back to wherever it was she lived now. The three of them together again, just as in the old days. “Is Fred with you?”

Cordelia shook her head sadly. “Everything that’s left of Fred is part of Illyria now, Wes, and Illyria isn’t here either.” She rested her head on his shoulder for a moment, her breath warm against his neck. “I know you’re tired. But there are other ways to rest than being dead.”

“In my experience, the only times I ever got a good night’s sleep was when on morphine after a near-fatal injury.”

“That’s why Giles is going to take you away from LA.”

“I don’t want to go with Giles.” He felt panicked at just the thought. “I want to stay with Gunn.”

“Gunn’s going too, remember? They talked it over with you this morning? Told you about the nice coven with the nice witches? Don’t make a fuss, will you, Wes?”

“Do I usually?” he countered, a little hurt, tracing a line along the blanket covering Gunn’s bed to avoid her eye.

She reached up and turned his face around so that he had to meet her gaze. “Just do what they say. Get on the plane. Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ as if everyone you meet is real. Go with Giles and Willow and Gunn, and do what you’re told.”

He felt a sulk coming on. “I don’t want to ‘do what I’m told’, thank you, Cordelia. I’m not six.”

“You’re not mentally competent either. You’re talking to a dead woman right now. How sane is that?”

“If you stay away from me I won’t have to talk to people who aren’t here, will I?” he countered, regretting his words a moment later. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Don’t go.” He lowered his gaze again. “If I go to England with Giles, how will I see you again?”

“I’m on a higher plane, remember? I can go anywhere. Just imagine I’m Daniel Day Lewis and you’re Madeleine Stowe.”

“You will find me?”

She straightened his collar. “Someone really needs to take you shopping. What happened to all those great shirts you had, anyway? Sometimes the wages of sin are Ralph Lauren and Moschini and I don’t see what’s so wrong with that, and, yes, I’ll find you. So will anyone else who wants to. Angel will know where you are, Wes.”

And now it was said. He looked away again; it was just too painful to contemplate otherwise.

“Hey…” She stroked his hair gently. “I know it hurts. You think I don’t miss him too?”

“You left us, Cordelia. You chose to leave us. And nothing has been right since you left. No, that’s not fair, nothing has been right since I…”

“Don’t even think about saying it.”

“If I hadn’t taken Connor then Angel would never have had to take the deal with Wolfram & Hart. Fred would still be…”

“Blown up three years ago when Holtz firebombed the hotel? Wes, you don’t know what would have happened if you or anyone else had done something different. We all did what we did. We all thought we were acting for the best. I let them demonize me. You kidnapped Connor. Tell me either one of us did it because we wanted to turn our own lives and those of the people we loved best to total crap? Did you get handed some kind of road map showing you how to live your life in the dramarama of Angel’s mythic destiny? Because I know I didn’t. I thought I was doing the right thing. Would I do it over the same way? Hell, no. But, we don’t have an undo button. We have to go onto the next thing. All those years working with Angel and you’re telling me you don’t know that?”

“I’m afraid of the next thing.” He gazed into her brown eyes, and felt his own well with tears. He missed her so much, and had missed her for so long before she had been finally lost to them. He reached out and touched her face and she felt as warm and alive as Gunn. 

“I know, sweetie.” She had tears in her eyes too. “But it’s never as bad as you think. Take it from someone who had her body hijacked by a rogue higher power so it could give birth to itself and ended up in a mystical coma before dying at the peak of her physical hotness. Ultimately, what you need to remember is that there are Manolo Blahniks in heaven.”

“I want to stay with you…” he protested. “We can wait for Angel together.”

“Not your time, remember?” she repeated gently, through the tears. She pressed her lips to his in farewell and he wrapped his arms around her, feeling her warmth, her solidity, inhaling her scent, the softness of her hair under his hand, her cheek against his, so soft against the rasp of his stubble. She hugged him hard, whispering: “You have to let me go, Wes. You have to let us all go and let go of everything’s that happened, and move on to the new place. This isn’t your life now.”

“Don’t go…” he pleaded.

“I will find you, remember?” She was trying to smile through the tears, the way she had used to smile through the migraines of a vision headache. She pressed a last kiss to his forehead, her lips touching the place where Illyria had also bid him farewell. And then, as he was still reaching for her, she was gone.

“Cordelia…?” But there was no answer and he turned to find Gunn awake and looking at him with concern in his brown eyes. It occurred to him that he had never loved anyone who didn’t have brown eyes.

“Wes? You okay? Why are you crying?”

He wiped his eyes. “What if Angel comes back to the alley? What if he goes back to the Hyperion and we’re not there? How will he find us? What if he loses his memory like the time he came back from hell? We should wait for him.”

“Angel’s gone.” Gunn sat up, wincing at the pain, tubes dangling from his hands, reaching out to clasp Wesley’s arm to steady himself. “Maybe he’s coming back and maybe he ain’t but he’s not here any more and we can’t spend the next ten years waiting for him to show up. We have to get our lives together – without Angel.”

Wesley flinched from the thought of that; a big empty space where their purpose had been. 

“Hey, remember when he fired us and went off on his kill the lawyers kick? We still did some good, didn’t we? Still helped some people? Saved some lives? We can do that again. But, man, you’ve got to get well because I need you. Forget about what Giles said this morning, about your training and the knowledge you have and the languages you can read. I need you because you’re you and you’re the only damned thing I have left. But we can’t stay here. We’ve got too many enemies in this town and not enough friends.”

Wesley sighed, knowing that if Gunn was determined to go to England with Giles that he would have to go as well. As the only thing left that he recognized, the man was necessary to him, and, hallucination or not, at least Gunn didn’t disappear every time they had a conversation. “Cordelia said she could find us wherever we were.”

Gunn looked more troubled than relieved by that information and then forced a smile. “Well, there you go then. If Cordy can find us you bet Angel can too. In the meantime, we need to disappear and Giles can cover our tracks.”

Wesley rested his head on his arms on Gunn’s bed, feeling the solid contours of the man’s body against his elbows. “I’m tired.”

“Wes, don’t sleep like that, you’re going to put your neck out. Lie down in your own bed.”

“I want to stay here.” He closed his eyes and drifted into a peaceful sleep while Gunn or at least the hallucination that looked like Gunn told him that whether Wesley liked it or not they were going to England’s green and goddamned pleasant land.

***

##### 2: Westbury, Wilts.

> By grief is the shadow granted substance.  
>  William F. DeVault

Wesley awoke to the sound of an owl hooting through the open window of his bedroom. He lay still for a moment and just listened, carried back by that sound to so many nights when he had awoken as a child and heard other owls calling to one another in the starlit night. It anchored him as nothing else could have done. He had not heard that sound once in Los Angeles and one ‘t’woo’ was enough to let him know that there was no point listening for the sound of traffic or the wail of sirens. That part of his life had been left behind.

The coven was situated in a huge old farmhouse surrounded by several acres of organically-farmed fields and a section of privately-owned ancient woodland. Willow had taken him for several walks in the woods, presumably on the grounds that they were healing in some way. He had enjoyed the walks well enough, although he still missed the elms he had taken for granted for the early part of his childhood. Today, on their walk, Willow had gathered various mosses and lichens and leaves and stones that she needed for some cleansing ritual the coven had been asked to perform on a nearby haunted house. He had watched water trickling over rocks and felt the sunlight dapple onto his face through the waving branches and thought about showing this place to Fred, teaching her the names of these very English trees, telling her about his childhood. All the things they had never talked about in the time they had wasted in silence that they could have filled with words.

When he looked up, he wasn’t particularly surprised to see Fred standing in the deep shade beneath a yew tree. She was looking extraordinarily lovely in a floaty green dress. She put a finger to her lips and nodded her head in the direction of Willow. He gave Fred a tentative wave and she waved back, giving him a big smile, one of those ones that warmed him inside like good brandy. With her slender graceful body and long brown hair unbound and curling around her shoulders he thought she looked like a dryad. It was a relief that she had found him over here; despite Cordelia’s words of reassurance, he had been afraid they might not visit him again.

“Wesley…?”

He turned to find Willow gazing at him quizzically and when he looked back Fred had ducked out of sight. Willow followed his gaze to the tree and he thought he had better make something up to explain why he had been waving to it.

“Yew trees were very important to the ancient druids,” was the first thing that came into his head.

“To Hecate too.” Willow gave him an encouraging smile. “And in Ancient Ireland they were thought to have the power of memory and to be able to bear witness.” There was a pause before she asked tentatively: “Wesley, are you…seeing things…? Because sometimes you seem to be looking at people that aren’t… that I can’t see.”

“How do I know?” he asked, he thought quite reasonably. “I can see you but I don’t have any empirical evidence that you’re real.”

“I am,” she insisted.

“But, maybe you’re not and you just don’t know it? Have you ever not been real?” 

“No, that’s what I’m telling you. I’m completely a hundred percent accept no substitutes real.”

“Well then, how would you know how it felt? To not be real? I was dead. I remember dying, and yet now you treat me as if I’m alive.”

“You are alive, Wesley. See…” She pinched him lightly on the arm. “Would I be able to do that to a dead person?”

“You might if you were dead too. Or if this is a dream; if this is all taking place in just the time between body death and brain death after my heart stopped beating. This could all be one long Pincher Martin. Or it could be a hell punishment to make me think I’m safe in England by a yew tree when I’m really about to be tortured in a hell dungeon.”

“I’m not dead and neither are you. I brought you back.”

“Why?” He gazed into her green eyes.

She grimaced. “Because I could. And because I felt that I should.”

“Well, I feel I’d like to be alone with that tree for a while. Is that okay with you?” 

She hadn’t really left him alone, but she went a little further away and then kept an eye on him surreptitiously. He walked around the great seamed trunk of the yew and found Fred on the other side of it. They’d had to converse in whispers as she told him Illyria was still angry about not being able to kill fifty thousand demons and the lessening of her powers, and how it should have been her task to alter time that Wesley might never have been injured. 

“Well, give her my regards,” he said a little awkwardly.

“I’m not angry with you for making friends with her,” she assured him. “I know it was for my sake. For the spark of me that was left in her.”

“I don’t understand why you had to die like that.”

She looked more amused than not. “Because dying in a different way wouldn’t have been so bad?”

It was the unfairness of it that still irked him. Quite apart from the lacerating grief there was a completely independent resentment at the unfairness. “You survived all those years on Pylea. You taught yourself how to make traps and kill things to eat. You stole and hid, and you were so clever you could work out the equations to open a wormhole. You endured two years in the Hyperion fighting demons and averting an apocalypse and you die because you’re curious?”

“You’re still angry with me about that, aren’t you?”

“A little,” he admitted.

“Well, I’m a little angry with you for being too slow to catch a cold when it comes to realizing a woman’s interested in you.”

“You weren’t giving any outward signs,” he protested.

Fred rolled her eyes. “Cordy was right about you. You’re really not too good with women.”

He felt a little aggrieved. “I was educated in a series of single-sex establishments.”

“I know…” she sighed. “But I invited you in for coffee and you said I looked tired and you’d see me in work and then you told me how much you loved me and how happy I’d made you and you got back into the car and went away.”

“You did look tired.” He remembered it distinctly. “We’d been working to get that spell reversed that turned Angel into a puppet and we’d had little or no sleep. I didn’t want to outstay my welcome.”

“And the next night I asked if I could come up and look at that book you were telling me about, the one counteracting spells for making portals into demon dimensions. And do you remember what you said…?”

He thought back. “That I could bring it into work tomorrow.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“I did bring it in,” he protested. “I was going to show it to you at lunchtime. It wasn’t my fault you decided to inhale a lot of mummy dust and get yourself murdered.”

She reached across and tapped him on the forehead. “Think about the reasons why a woman asks to come up to a man’s apartment at night, Wesley! I didn’t care about the book, I just wanted a reason to go up to your bedroom.”

“Oh.” He vaguely remembered her saying something about finally getting him up to her bedroom when she was dying, but he’d been thinking how childlike she seemed, her body seeming so frail and small beside his, taking comfort from the book she had asked him to read. “I suppose while I could believe that you might have fallen in love with me, as you told me you had, I did find it a little difficult to believe that you actually wanted to have sex with me.”

“Well, I did,” she told him forcefully. “Just because I was a few degrees subtler than Ms Evil Lawyer…Person doesn’t mean I didn’t want to have sex with you. Gunn and I used to have lots of sex. I used to wear him out. I used to make him beg for mercy.”

“I don’t need to know that.”

“You already did know it. It’s not like we were quiet about it. I’m just pointing out that you knew I was a sexual being, is all.”

“You looked so…pure.”

“Do you know how many years I took ballet lessons? Do you know what kind of muscles a girl has to possess to take all her weight on the toes of one foot? Calf and thigh muscles, Wesley. Serious thigh muscles.”

Wesley gulped and adjusted his collar. “Well, I’m sorry.”

“And you know what? I think you knew all the time what I wanted and you just wimped out on me because you were worried it wouldn’t be perfect.”

“I certainly thought it was less likely to be perfect when we were both exhausted, sweaty and had been battered by demon puppets, yes.”

“And you know what else? I think you were worried you’d forgotten how to have nice normal loving sex because of all that time you spent letting Ms Evil Lawyer…Person do really icky things to you.”

Wesley grimaced. “Well, I admit, I may have had some slight concerns about…”

“‘It’s not always about holding hands’, Wesley? You think I didn’t get that?”

“To be honest I thought you didn’t get it at all or have any clue what I was talking about. And I can assure you that anything Lilah did to me I did back to her with interest.”

“So, I get to die without ever having sex with the man I loved just because when you were all bitter and self-loathing you were whoring yourself out to Lilah Morgan and, afterwards, you weren’t sure you could remember how to have sex without breaking the furniture first? I seem to remember you and Gunn managed it okay when I was running for my life and you were all cosy with Jasmine.”

He winced. “I’m sorry about that but we were under the mind control of… And I don’t think Gunn and I actually… Fred, I’d already shown you so much of the darkness inside me. I didn’t want to…frighten you off.”

“Maybe I liked the darkness inside you, Wesley. Maybe there’s a darkness inside me, too. Do you remember what I wanted to do to my professor? All those times we talked about what Angelus was, what Angel told us Darla said – about some darkness being innate…? Didn’t you ever wonder why Illyria picked me?”

“Knox selected you to be the host for Illyria. There was no selection process made by Illyria herself.” He snatched a breath. “Do you…talk to Illyria?”

“Sometimes. She has some pretty impressive thigh muscles too and she really wants to shove you down on the floor and…”

He held up a hand. “Yes, thank you, Fred. I get the picture.”

“Are you sure?” she demanded. “Cause I was thinking I might have to draw it for you.”

“I just don’t think of you…like this.”

“But you knew,” she reminded him gently. “You always knew who I really was. You knew I didn’t survive five years on Pylea being pure and sweet.”

“I didn’t want you to be pure and sweet,” he insisted. “I may have been guilty of idealizing you a little but...”

“Oh, Wesley…” She reached up to stroke a hand through his hair, sad but fond. “If you’d idealized me any more I would have had to be Angel.”

“Did I tell you not to use a portal to cast your evil professor into a hell dimension because it would upset my view of you as something untainted and good? No. That was Gunn. I liked you how you were.”

She sighed. “I just wish I knew for sure that your view of how I was and mine were even a little bit alike.”

“Well, me too. Lilah said that you would never know me the way she did.” 

“Well, she was right, thanks to you being all coy and saving yourself, I never did get to know you in the Biblical sense, did I?”

His turn to sigh. “Let’s not fight. I love you so much and I miss you all the time…”

“I know.” She stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the forehead. “I love you too.”

Eager to change the subject, Wesley asked her about her box of possessions, the toy rabbit which had so confused him. “What was his name?” he asked. 

Fred smiled and kissed him. “I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know, Wesley, you know the rules.”

“I killed Knox.”

“You probably shouldn’t have done that.”

“I stabbed Gunn.”

“You definitely shouldn’t have done that. All he did was sign a piece of paper. Nothing he did afterwards would have made any difference.”

“I know.” He lowered his voice still further to add: “He’s out of the wheelchair. The doctors said it would be weeks but Willow has been healing him. Should I tell him you said hello?”

She shook her head. “Probably not. We don’t want him thinking you’re crazy.”

“Am I crazy?” he pressed. As someone who had been a crazy person herself for a while, he thought she was probably better qualified than most to know. There was also a good chance that she would know if she were real or a hallucination, the way she had been able to work out exactly what degree of ghost Spike was. He could imagine her bringing her scientific acumen to bear upon that particular problem with great skill. “Fred…? Am I…?”

Which was when she vanished, and left him talking to a tree. Later he had gone to bed early and Willow and Giles had talked for hours in the room underneath his bedroom, a hushed consultation that nevertheless crept up through the ill-fitting floorboards like smoke, in which Giles suggested cleansing spells and Willow said she wanted to leave it a little longer, just a little longer. At the time he hadn’t understood, but now as he listened to the owl hooting through the open window, he finally comprehended what they had been discussing.

“That’s right, lover.”

He looked up to find Lilah walking towards him with a seductive swing of her hips. 

“What’s right? And it’s good to see you, Lilah.”

“Giles wants Willow to do a spell to help you differentiate between reality and… well, people like me. And it’s good to see you, too, although I have to say I’ve seen you looking better.”

“You too.” He drew a finger across his throat and she raised an eyebrow at him as she sat on the bed and leaned across to whisper in his ear:

“If we’re talking about unsightly scars, let’s not forget you gave me this one and you had yours first…” Then she was licking up his neck and he was shivering at the delicious warmth of her tongue on his skin. “I always knew how to push your buttons…” she murmured in satisfaction.

“How did you find me?” He reached out, tentatively, and stroked her hair back from her face, the way he had after she had been dead, which she still was, of course, technically speaking.

“Oh, there are exit signs even in hell, handsome. They won’t miss me for an hour.” She breathed on his neck again, making him gasp with the pleasure of it, feeling himself get hard as her lick traced his scar and then her open mouth hovered over the place where a vampire would bite. “You really are a psychiatrist’s dream, you know that? And as for that creepy crush you had on your dead psycho boss…”

“You never understood the complexity of our relationship – which was strictly platonic.” He wasn’t actually certain about that; his memories of many events being somewhat hazy, but he said it as if he had no doubts and hoped he wasn’t just bluffing her. They had been equally matched at poker in the past but he suspected she might have learned a few new tricks in hell.

“I understood it better than you did. You were born to crush, Wesley. And as for Angel, well, he never liked sharing, did he? Don’t try to tell me it’s pure coincidence that the first thing deadboy did when he got out of that cage was come after the woman you’d been sleeping with.”

“Angelus isn’t Angel.”

“Maybe he is now.” She stroked his hair back from his forehead, examining it critically. “You know you looked so much better when I was taking care of your…needs.”

“Have you seen him?”

“No. That’s what I came here to tell you in case you were wondering. Not sure if you ever got around to reading the fine print on the contract Angel signed. It wasn’t an employment contract, no standard perpetuity clause. None of you had to report to hell for your afterlives. He made that a condition. Didn’t want you all tortured for all eternity – what a guy, eh? The only thing he signed was the agreement to give Connor a new life and to give us permission to mess with the memories of the rest of you. And please tell me you’re still pissed with him about that?”

“I’m over it.”

Lilah rolled her eyes but began to unbutton her blouse. “Well, you shouldn’t be.”

“He was trying to save his son and do the best for Cordelia, do the best for all of us. He thought he was doing the right thing.”

“I thought it was kind of high-handed and arrogant myself. Not to mention controlling. Didn’t you ever wonder about that fantasy the Kun-Sun-Dai spun to make him lose it? Ever think about your part in that whole ‘perfect happiness’ thing…?”

“No.” He kissed her throat. It felt cool against his lips, not cold or in any way unpleasant, just the coolness of the dead, but it still smelt like her, like that very expensive perfume she liked to dab on to mingle with the after-sex sweat scent on her skin that always made him want to pull her back down onto the bed. He licked at her collarbone. “You never understood Angel. How could you? He cared about doing what was right.”

“Harsh.” She smiled at him seductively, her fingers closing in his hair, dragging his head up so she could crush his mouth in a kiss before licking around it salaciously. “But I think I understood Soul Boy better than you think. I think there’s a part of you that understood him too, you just didn’t want to acknowledge it to yourself. We both know Angelus was always closer than any of you wanted to admit.”

He was already hard; as if it was enough just to feel her skin against his; his breath catching as his heartbeat increased. “He was trying to undo what I’d done and to take away memories neither of us were sure I could live with. He was trying to protect Connor, and Cordelia, and all of us.” She had pulled off her bra and he cupped her breasts, bending his head to mouth at her left nipple.

She pulled his head in tight against her, encouraging him to suck. “And we all know how well that turned out, right? Or was I mistaken about the whole ‘you all ending up dead’ thing? I mean if we’re talking strategy here, Cordelia never really woke up from that coma, the Texas Twig got turned into the Blue-Rinsed Bitch, you were gutted by a guy you should never have been sent to fight, and Gunn – and this was a shocker – got himself cut open by the half a dozen vampires he was in no way equipped to kill single-handed. Angel was so busy making that last big glorious gesture that he got you all killed.”

Wesley acknowledged it with a sigh, knowing his breath must be a warm gust against her nipple; feeling that shiver of anticipation go through her. “Well, he never pretended to be a strategist and we knew the risks. We all took on those assignments with our eyes open.”

She licked up his neck again and then her teeth closed on his skin, making him shiver with longing. “Maybe so, but without the ginger wicca and old man grouch, you’re still a corpse right now.”

“Can we just have sex?” he pleaded, his fingers already running up her thigh.

“I always knew you had no problem with necrophilia, Wesley – Angel’s faithful little watcher and keeper of the cult of the repentantly ensouled.” But she was pushing his head in the direction of her right breast, reminding him that it had not yet been welcomed back to his bed, and when he licked the cool mound her nipple hardened under his tongue, just like old times. 

It was like remembered dance steps, her teeth pinching his skin, her fingers freeing his erection as she pulled down the ludicrously formal pyjamas with which Giles had provided him, his mouth on her breasts, his fingers between her legs. She was already wet, although curiously cool to the touch. He slipped his fingers in deep, twisting them the way she liked, making her arch and mew and punish him for daring to take her to the brink so easily by slamming herself down onto him, hard and skilfully enough to make him see stars, grinding her hips with a precision that proved that whatever muscles those ballet lessons had given Fred, Lilah was in no need of pelvic floor exercises either. 

The sex was quick and needy and as passionate as ever. He came gasping with her sprawled across him, head clearing from that lust-blurred daze to wonder if there was something very wrong with having sex with a corpse unless you were already one yourself. As he opened his mouth to ask her, she whispered: “Whatever gets you off, lover…” and disappeared. He looked down at the hand into which he had come and tried to recapture the scent of her perfume, but it was gone, the breeze from the open window chill on the sweat cooling on his skin.

He cleaned himself up in the bathroom, washing his hands with particular care, trying to remember the taste of her on his tongue, but she seemed to have taken that memory with her.

He was embarrassed to find Fred sitting on the bed waiting for him when he got back. “I really don’t like that woman,” she told him. “I mean I’m sorry she’s dead and all. It was terrible what was done to her. But I don’t like her and if I’m honest about it, I will never in a million years understand how you could have sex with her when you knew she was evil. Would you have sex with me if I were evil?”

“You’re not evil.” He sat on the bed next to her.

“Illyria is. And she wears tight-fitting leather, which you boys are supposed to like so much, although frankly I can’t help wondering how she goes to the bathroom.”

“I don’t think she does.” He took her hand in his; worried she might pull it away after his being unfaithful to her with Lilah. “I don’t think she has…bodily functions of any kind.”

“Well then, I guess that explains the outfit.” She kissed him on the lips, her mouth warm against his. “We never made love and now we never will. I’m still a little pissed with you about that.”

“So you said. But we still could…?” he suggested, kissing her back tenderly.

She shook her head. “You don’t have a memory of it. You don’t even have a fantasy of it. Which is kind of strange, don’t you think?”

“I had fantasies,” he insisted.

“About me returning your feelings. About us having a life together. About us having kids and a dog and being happy shiny demon killers all the day long. What about the sweaty naked kind?”

“It felt like an intrusion into your privacy.” He bowed his head. “I didn’t think I had the right.” Especially after I tried to kill you.

She sighed. “And now I’m dead you’d never let yourself think of me that way. Which means we’ll never be able to catch up with the things we missed out on.” She stroked his hair back from his face, luminous brown eyes intent and serious. “Maybe I was afraid of the darkness in you. I wanted you to be the man I thought you were when we first met; the one who was safe and kind and who I could always rely on to do and say the right thing.”

“And then I chased you through the hotel with an axe.”

“Yes.” She kissed him again, with incredible tenderness. “And after that…”

“You fell in love with Gunn.”

“It was always in me, too. I think you recognized something in me that was in you as well – that capacity to be insane, to be cruel when what you really wanted was to be kind. But what I thought I wanted was a man who was reliable all the time – who was sane and wise and safe, and every time I thought you were the one I could trust you did something that frightened me. You took Connor and you didn’t seem to care about Angel even though you’d saved his life, and you didn’t seem to care about…”

“You?” He kissed her again, running his fingers through the silky weight of her curling brown hair. “I always cared about you, Fred. I always cared about Angel, too, and Cordelia and Gunn. I just…what was the point in me wearing my heart on my sleeve when you’d all rejected me?”

“We wasted so much time,” she said sadly. “I spent so long being scared, of the past, of the present, of…”

“Me?”

“When we were in Wolfram & Hart, you seemed so normal and so happy, and I knew somehow there was some reason why you weren’t really that man, but I didn’t remember – none of us did, thanks to Angel – so I thought I was just being foolish, and there you were, and I liked you so much, and yet I kept thinking Knox was somehow…safer.”

“Well, that was ironic.”

“You shot your father in front of me, Wesley. You shot him nine times.”

“He was threatening you.”

“That explained the first bullet. What about the other eight? What about the one when he was lying dead on the ground and yet you kept shooting him anyway?”

He closed his eyes at the memory. “I didn’t know how much anger I had inside until that moment.”

“You can’t blame me for being a little scared of getting involved. I wanted someone safe.”

“Is that what you thought I was? When you decided I was the one you wanted, after all?”

“Cordy was gone and there was so little time and however dangerous some part of you was it had never done me any harm. No, that’s not really how it was at all.”

“How was it then?”

“I can’t tell you things you don’t know and you never did know why I loved you.”

“I wanted to be your knight. I always did. I would have worn your colours into any battle, but in the end I didn’t save you.” He rested his forehead against hers, feeling the warmth of her against his skin.

“I didn’t save you either.”

“You gave me comfort when I was dying.”

“But it was a lie. In the end, all I had to offer you was a lie.”

He opened his eyes and she dissolved in front of him, even though he had been able to touch her and feel her. “It was a beautiful lie,” he said to the darkness. There was no scent of Fred’s perfume either. The room was cold from the breeze that blew in through the open window and smelt only of semen and sweat and the furtive satisfaction a man found with his right hand. 

***

Giles looked at the photographs again. Disconcerting those images of himself, black and white and then colour, the terrible fashions, the long hair, the attitude. Dear God, the seventies had a lot to answer for. Rupert Giles, wannabe warlock, wannabe rockstar, wearing eyeliner and defiantly smoking a joint while Miranda, despite not being on the way to San Francisco at the time, had actual flowers in her long blonde hair, at least some of which was flyaway from too much friction with an afghan coat that he remembered had stunk of patchouli oil. No wonder Alicia had warned her mother never to get out the photograph album when her schoolfriends came round. 

Looking back, he supposed that Miranda was probably the reason why he was more or less heterosexual. He was embarrassed about it now, that simplistic act of reasoning that had taken place that had led him to decide that sleeping with men was mad, bad and dangerous to do, whereas sleeping with women was Safe and Good. Even at the time he had probably been aware that at least half of Ethan’s attraction had been that he was so very unsuitable. Exactly the kind of person the Watcher’s Council, his father, his university lecturers, everyone who had his future mapped out for him, would most wholeheartedly disapprove of. Fucking Ethan had felt defiant and daring, an act of independence, every French kiss a two-fingered salute to everyone staid and square who thought they had the right to lecture him about ‘duty’. The fact that Ethan was not in any way a good human being had somehow seemed unimportant. He was the perfect person with whom one could signal rebellion. Miranda had been a sanctuary. There was a choice to be made when the person you were with witnessed a death for which you were both partially responsible and did little more than shrug. Either one embraced amoral indifference to the fates of others, gave oneself up to chaos, and became his other half forever, or turned around and walked the other way.

Miranda had liked him for some time before they had lived together. There been the kind of one night stands that meant less to him than to her. She had been on the periphery of their magic circle; someone who knew they weren’t pulling rabbits out of hats, who had annoyed and bored him at several gatherings by telling him that he was playing with forces he couldn’t control, that he didn’t even properly understand. When being cool and dangerous had seemed the most fun way to live his life, he had resented her goody-goody white witch outlook on the world. But in the wake of Randall’s death, he had fled straight to the bosom of her certainties. He had never needed quite so much to wake up in the arms of someone who knew right from wrong. Nor could he have borne to be alone. The only thing worse would have been waking up next to Ethan and realizing that he had been having sex for all these months with someone who wasn’t just pretending for the instamatic cameras that he didn’t care about Good and Evil or which side of it he was on, but someone who genuinely was indifferent to the difference.

He and Miranda had been on-again-off-again for a while. Eighteen months together seriously and exclusively, almost four years apart, then three years together-but-seeing-other-people. In one of their off-again times, Miranda had dabbled briefly with conventionality, living in a flat, instead of in a tepee or a communal house, with an estate agent who neither played an instrument nor knew how to cast spells. Alicia had been conceived, as Miranda always put it, on a piece of Axminster very close to a lava lamp that had already been a little passé. The estate agent had later married his secretary. Alicia had been born on the day Margaret Thatcher came to power and Giles had visited Miranda in the hospital on the way back from the polling station where he had cast his ultimately useless vote, thinking at the time how much his previous self would have sneered at the man he had become, someone who had turned away from anarchy to embrace the political process, a Watcher, after all his declarations about never going down that road. It hadn’t even been an act of penance; embarrassed as he was to admit it, finding himself a traitor to his rebellious self, he even enjoyed it. For the first time in his life he felt this was something he could do better than anyone else. It had been very annoying to discover that, after all, his father had been right and there was something about bending one’s life to duty and tradition and Right that was more satisfying than smoking marijuana and dabbling in magic. Not that he didn’t still light up every now and then, but at least he felt he’d earned his occasional joint these days. 

He had taken Miranda balloons and flowers in the hospital where she had been bullied into giving birth on the grounds that no woman could possibly know better than a doctor where she wanted to undergo arguably the most important experience of her life. He had been stereotypically astonished by the smallness of the baby’s fingernails, the way his friend had suddenly turned from one uncomfortably large person into two, one of which was a whole new life. For the first time he realized why people wallowed in clichés when babies appeared; nothing about them should have been in any way surprising and yet the fact of them, when they were a three-dimensional squirming bundle placed in unready arms, was almost impossible to comprehend.

Alicia had been three when Giles had started seeing her mother again. It had never been that committed a venture, but it had been fun, and friendly, and there had been kindness and respect and companionship. He had picked up Alicia from school more than once, and been included in birthdays and outings. He had been a semi-permanent fixture in her life in those early years, until Miranda had gone off to study under someone Giles had assumed was a charlatan but who had turned out to be a witch of considerable – albeit benevolent – power. When Alicia had been eight, Miranda had moved into a communal house with a man who had later introduced her to the other witches of the coven. When she had broken up with him, the coven had welcomed her. She had been there ever since.

Her relationship with Alicia had often been tempestuous, Giles remembered that. They had loved each other, but Alicia had resented what she called the long line of ex-hippies and freaks who had been such a feature of her childhood, craving the stability of a house and a dog and a father who came home every day and called her ‘princess’. She had turned against the magic that was such a part of her life as Giles had rejected his calling as a Watcher. She had taken up smoking, and drinking, and then started sniffing glue. A rebellion Giles could understand if not condone.

When Miranda had called him out of the blue, sobbing down the line to him that she feared Alicia was going to kill herself with that stuff, he had thrown a suitcase into his battered old car and driven up to Blackpool where Alicia was at university. They had met on the pier under a multitude of flashing lights and he had told that he didn’t understand why she was choosing to have her out of body experiences that way, by a method so sordid and unimaginative when she had it in her to ride the astral plane to a high better than any heroin kick or solvent abuse dream.

“I don’t believe in that witchcraft crap,” she’d told him fiercely.

“That’s like not believing in fire engines. You can pretend you don’t hear the sirens, but the fact is that they exist.”

“My mother’s delusional and you’re just making her worse.”

They’d stood and watched the sea going out, the lovers walking hand in hand along the beach, romantic and faintly ridiculous at once, a solitary dog barking as it chased a stick. “You used to love magic spells when you were a little girl.”

“Well, I grew up. It’s time you and Mum did the same.”

“It must be in you. It’s very rare that a witch doesn’t pass on the power to a daughter. I rejected control when I was your age. I turned away from everything that my parents wanted me to be, so it’s not as if I don’t understand the need to establish your own identity, separate from everyone’s expectations.”

“Spare me the empathy, please. I’m not riding a broomstick for anyone.”

“You have power, Alicia. You can use it for good or evil, or you can squander it completely. You also have compassion and intelligence and the ability to know right from wrong. The universal problem of teenagers since the dawn of time is their paralysing terror of the world and their place in it. You can sidestep the possibility of failure by choking on your own vomit on a park bench somewhere or you can have courage enough to face your fears and live in the world that frightens you and all your friends so very much that you can’t even look at it except through a haze of solvent. I’m staying here.” He handed her a postcard with the name and address of the hotel and his room number. “I’ll be in town for three days. If you would like to find out if you have inherited your mother’s magical abilities or not, I’ll be happy to teach you how to cast a simple spell. If not, goodbye.”

As he had turned to go, she had said: “I don’t see why you couldn’t have stayed. I don’t see why you and Mum couldn’t have made a go of it.”

Giles had hesitated, seeing the lights behind her head, her fair hair red and orange and green in the winking lights, wondering if this was always going to be his last sight of her. “I don’t either, now. But at the time it made sense to both of us to be together when we were together and apart when we were apart. It was certainly no fault of hers or yours. I missed you very much, Alicia.”

He had hoped it wasn’t just his imagination that there had seemed to be a glint of tears in her eyes as he turned and walked away.

She had called him on the second day, a long pause as he waited for the caller to speak, hoping it was her, and then that rush of words: I want to try it. I’m not promising anything. But I want to see if I can. I just want to know. I’m not saying you’re right…

They had eaten fish and chips out of newspaper and then cast a simple spell in the privacy of his room that confirmed that her mother’s powers had indeed been passed on. In truth, Miranda had never been a witch of any particular power, although she had been disciplined and measured, always, in the way she used what she had, and Alicia had possessed less power again, but there had been something there, enough to feel the magic catch and flow and spark and then ignite. Giles thought of the wonder on her face when she was eighteen and so behind in her coursework she didn’t know how to cope, but had just made a candle float across the room. He remembered her fair hair haloed and the flame of that floating candle casting light and shadow on her face. She had laughed in shock and delight, gazing across at him, and he had remembered her being six years old, on her birthday, sitting amidst a mound of torn wrapping paper, clapping her hands delightedly because he had made her cake rise up and spin…

 

Somewhere in the house a clock struck three. Too early even for the first birdsong, that weighty silence, as heavy as the water that flowed through a shipwreck. Tears spattered onto his hand and Giles wiped them away impatiently. He lifted another photograph, and there was Alicia on her sixth birthday party, her hair so much lighter than it had become later, clapping her hands together in excitement, so full of life and fun and with so many years ahead of her. Except her life had stopped at twenty-five, and she would never again go back to her strange little flat over the tea shop that she had described to him in a postcard; or take the bus into Knaresborough to visit her friend at the bookshop; or get a coach back to the White Horse to visit her mother and tell her not to fuss. She would never do anything again, because someone had strung her up by the ankles in a deserted cave, and cut her throat, and bled her like a pig and then written on the wall in Alicia’s blood: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

***

There was a different quality of morning light here. Gunn was used to the brightness of the California sun shimmering on a crowded sidewalk; the smog that rose up on the heat haze every morning and blocked out the stars every night but which made every sunset something so spectacular no Turner could have captured it. The sky was wide and open in California, like it knew it was covering a land that went on forever. It was mellower here, the sky washed out like a faded watercolour, the sunlight faint and slightly apologetic, like it was sorry for being even this much of an exhibitionist and it would soon be doing the British thing and slipping back behind a cloud. With the weak tea and the weaker sunlight, perhaps it was no wonder that the blood of the natives was so damned thin.

Gunn found Willow in the herb garden. She was picking rosemary and dropping the fragrant grey-green leaves into a basket. He thought she should have really been dressed in something with embroidery and long sleeves, instead of jeans and that little t-shirt. She didn’t even have a black cat winding its way around her ankles. It was a relief to look across to the house and see that there was a cat sunning itself on the flags. It wasn’t black, more like crumple-eared and ginger, but at least someone was trying to give a broomstick feel to the place.

“Hey,” he said awkwardly.

She gave him a welcoming smile. “How are you feeling?”

“A lot better than I should be.” He pulled up his sweater vest and showed her the faint scar. “I’m no doctor but I’m figuring nearly-fatal wounds don’t tend to heal that fast unless someone’s…helping them out.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Do you mind?”

“Not having to be in a wheelchair and then hobbling around with a stick being in all kinds of pain for all kinds of time? Not so much.” There was a seat set in among the chequerboard of herbs and old flags and he sank down onto it. “Just wanted to say thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She cut some chives. “How’s Wesley?”

Gunn grimaced. “You know…the same.”

He’d heard Wesley talking to himself the night before when he went past his room to the bathroom. This morning, as they were taking breakfast together in one of the back rooms that looked out onto the garden he’d asked the man who he’d been talking to.

“Fred.”

Gunn had been afraid of that but he tried to get with the crazy and not freak. “How did she sound?”

“Like my doubts.” Wesley had stared fixedly at the table for a moment while Gunn waited for him to say something philosophical about where Fred was now or what she was now post her fusion with Illyria. Instead he’d said: “Would you mind passing the marmalade?” Gunn had done so, eaten his toast, drunk his tea, and then come out here in search of someone sane to talk to.

“Have you seen Giles this morning?” he asked.

Willow shook her head. “He’s with Miranda. They’ve been talking about when Alicia was a little girl. I haven’t seen Giles this upset since Buffy died.”

“So, he’s not always like this then?” Gunn couldn’t help feeling relieved by that. A Giles on this short a fuse and a Wesley this high maintenance could make for a life that was way too…interesting.

“No, he’s just…frustrated.” Willow sat back on her heels. “Angel should have told someone what he’d done, why he took the job at Wolfram & Hart.”

“He was trying to do some good.”

“Well, from our point of view, ever since Angel arrived in LA there’s this big evil law firm that’s been trying to corrupt him and get him to give into his dark side and one day we find out that he’s CEO of their Los Angeles branch. He doesn’t give anyone – not even Buffy – any kind of explanation as to why and the only time we hear from him is when he wants something.”

“One of the times when he wanted your help was clearing up one of Buffy’s messes,” Gunn pointed out. “And I don’t remember you guys giving us the heads up about Buffy empowering every potential in the land, crazy or not. You didn’t run every decision you made past us, so why should Angel keep you informed of his plans?”

Willow sighed. “Giles is just upset about what happened to all of you.”

Gunn had to take a moment to readjust to that idea. “He doesn’t even know us.”

“He knew Cordelia and Wesley, and now Cordy’s dead and Wesley’s…not himself. He’s sorry that it happened. He thinks some of it might be his fault.”

Gunn wondered if Watchers were just programmed from birth to think everything had to be their fault. “How could it possibly be his fault?”

“He’s wondering if he’d been nicer to Wesley in Sunnydale, if he’d made more of an effort to keep in touch…”

“That’s bull,” Gunn told her firmly. “You’re seeing Crazy Wesley, but this isn’t who he’s been for the past five years. Wes was doing fine without you guys. We all were. And as to how things went down – we were going up against the earthly representatives of the Senior Partners – we knew what we were getting into and we knew we probably weren’t going to make it out alive. I’m not saying we’re not grateful for what you did, but no one asked for your help.”

Willow rolled her eyes. “Oh, so we’re doing a whole y chromosome thing now?”

“Damned straight.”

“I suppose you don’t ask for directions either?”

“I’m just saying – the world I come from, a guy doesn’t have to hide behind a teenage girl if he sees a vampire in a dark alley. You don’t have to be superhuman to make a difference. You get a truck, you trick it out for dusting, you find people who feel the same way. You go out there and you do your bit for the rest of the human race. You don’t need to wait around for some mystically supercharged cheerleader to do it for you.”

“You’re not the only people without super powers to try to make a difference.”

Gunn remembered Spike telling him about Xander’s missing eye, those two pictures on Willow’s dresser – three teenagers smiling at the camera as if they didn’t have a care in the world contrasting with those three haggard-looking adults, Buffy with that look in her eyes as if she’d seen things no one should have to look at, Willow so frail-looking, and Xander with a patch where his left eye had been. Feeling a little ashamed of himself, he inclined his head. “I know.”

“We’ve all lost people.” The sun came out again and Willow squinted up at him from her place among green and silver herbs. “Buffy has lost Angel three times now. She’s never loved any other guy the way she loved him and she probably never will. I lost Tara. She was the love of my life. There will never be anyone for me like her again. Xander lost Anya. Giles lost Jenny. Just because we were still standing when the only home some of us had ever known fell into a big crater in the ground, doesn’t mean we didn’t pay a price too.”

“I’m sorry.” Gunn snapped off a piece of sage and held it out to her as a peace offering. “I just… This isn’t my home turf. I don’t know where I fit. The only thing I recognize is Wes, and half the time I don’t think he knows who I am. The whole time we were in that hospital I wanted to get him away from LA, and now we’re here I don’t remember why. I keep thinking we should go back, set up as detectives again, pay the mortgage on the Hyperion even, hope we get some of our old clients back…”

Willow took the sage from him and added it to the basket. “Wait for Angel?”

Gunn bowed his head. “Damn. No. Or yes, maybe. I don’t know. At least if we were in LA we could fold blankets for Anne. Do some good for someone. I don’t know how to live my life just for myself. I’ve been fighting vampires since I was twelve years old. I need something to do.”

“Well, shall we give it a couple of days until you can walk further than ten yards before you have to sit down? Because I’m thinking we’re going to have to let the vampires get pretty close before you’re going to be much use in a fight right now.”

He kind of liked her waspish. Sweetness and light was only going to take you so far and it was nice to know she had a little bite in there as well. “Do they even know what yards are over here or have they gone all metric?” 

She snorted. “They’re supposed to have gone metric but no one over thirty understands the new system so they have to put everything in two sizes. You know – not to totally change the subject or anything but there’s a spell I know that can help people to perceive the truth.”

“No.” He didn’t even have to think about that one.

“It’s not dangerous and it doesn’t have any side-effects, I promise.”

“Wes is going to get better, you just need to give him more time.”

Willow sighed. “I don’t know if it’s good for him to…”

Gunn thought about sitting down with Fred again; being able to tell her that he was sorry, that he had never meant to be any part of what had happened to her; that he would have died in a heartbeat in her place if it could have saved her; telling Cordy that he missed her every fuckin’ day. “Maybe it’s something he needs right now.”

“Giles thinks he won’t start to get better until he can differentiate between fantasy and reality.”

Gunn bowed his head to really look at her; the sunlight was playing on her hair, making it look edged with flame but her green eyes were full of doubt. “But you don’t agree with him, do you?”

“I’m not sure. Giles makes a pretty good argument for getting Wesley more with the sane program. What do you think?”

Gunn looked around at the herbs in their neat little beds, the pale yellowish stone of the farmhouse, the horses grazing in the fields, all of it much too neat and nice and pretty given all the horror there was in the world. How would you even remember what was out there if you lived like this? He snatched a breath. “I’ve never told anyone else this, not even Alonna. Not even Fred when we were… I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to my parents. They never had a night out, you know? But it was their anniversary – thirteen years, unlucky for some, my mother said, only she thought she was joking… So they asked the old lady over the hall to sit with us. They went to the movies. I don’t even remember what it was they went to see, but they walked home because they didn’t have that much money and it was only four blocks, no point in getting a cab. Only they never made it home because a gang of vampires ripped their throats out a hundred yards from our building.”

She reached out and squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry, Gunn.”

“The thing was I didn’t say goodbye. I was pissed that they made old Mrs Lancaster come over and sit with us when I could take care of Alonna. I wasn’t a little kid like her. I didn’t need no sitter. And the first thing I thought when the cops told us was that I was never going to get a chance to say goodbye.”

Willow said breathlessly, “I’m sure they knew you loved them.”

“The thing is I did get a chance to say goodbye, because I dreamed about them every night. And first they were alive in my dreams and I was so relieved it was just a mistake; the cops had mixed them up with someone else, and then the doubts would start to creep in, because there had been Dad’s wallet and that watch Mom wore, so, how could they make a mistake? I’d meet them in the park or on the edge of the practice field at school while a game was going on, and Mom would say she couldn’t stay but she wanted just to say goodbye and Dad would tell me he knew I was going to make him proud. And then I started to know – that they were dead – even in the dream, and I’d tell them I was sorry and I missed them but I was going to take care of Alonna.” He found there were tears in his eyes, just as he’d always feared there would be if he told this damned story to anyone, but somehow he didn’t mind as much as he’d expected with Willow. He wiped his eyes and shrugged. “The point is, I know it wasn’t them. I know my parents didn’t visit me in my dreams. But I still feel like I got closure, like I got to say goodbye, and that’s what my subconscious or whatever was doing, trying to help me out. So, what if this is helping Wes? What if this is what he needs to do before he can let go and move on? Who’s it hurtin’ to let him say his goodbyes?”

A crunch on the gravel made him look over his shoulder. Giles was standing against the sun, looking grim and bespectacled and worn out with grief, but also, for the first time, as if he understood. “I was afraid it might be hurting him.”

“Maybe he just needs to let go in his own way and his own time.”

Giles nodded. “I understand. I’m not prepared to let this situation continue indefinitely, but I am prepared to give him a little longer if you think it may be beneficial to him.”

The guy used so many more words than were actually necessary. Gunn thought of his past-self mocking Wesley’s: ‘Yes, give us that ‘purpose of an inventory’ speech...’ Not that it had made much difference. He’d done his best to get Wes trained up and God knows Cordy had tried too, but at the end of the day Wesley had still been pompous and stuffy and used ten two dollar words where two ten cent ones would work just as well. He guessed Watchers couldn’t help the way they talked. With a sudden pang he thought how much he would love it if Wesley started mouthing off about the purpose of an inventory now, standing there like he had a stick up his ass pontificating about the correct way to catalogue bladed weapons… The more he saw of Giles, the more he thought that Wesley had just been raised British and that was an incurable condition. “Yeah, I think it would be…beneficial to him.”

“I need to go to Harrogate. Alicia wasn’t the only victim of these people or demons, whoever they were. Two women she knew from Knaresborough were murdered as well. We’re either dealing with a deranged serial killer or else someone with a more logical and even more malevolent purpose. I’ve promised Miranda that I’ll investigate and…”

“You shouldn’t go alone,” Gunn said in the same breath as Willow’s: “I want to come with you.”

Giles looked between them in shock. “I don’t think it would be…”

“Safe for you to go there by yourself?” Willow countered. “Nor do I.”

“I’m not a witch, Willow.”

“You live in a coven and you’re technically a warlock.”

“I most certainly am not,” Giles said in indignation.

“Either way, I’m coming with you.” She stood up and folded her arms. “And this is my stubborn face.”

Gunn looked between her face and Giles’ and shrugged. “Man, I worked with Cordy for long enough to know when a chick isn’t going to be changing her mind whatever you say. May as well accept the inevitable, and if you think I’m letting you two go off and have all the fun of chasing the bad guys without me, you can think again.”

“What about Wesley?” Giles enquired.

“Change of scenery might be just what he needs,” Gunn tried to sound as if he was sure this was a good idea, when he so wasn’t.

Giles took off his glasses, cleaned them and then placed them back on his nose. “Fine. We’ll go together. But please be ready first thing in the morning. I want to leave by six am. It’s a five hour drive and we’re probably going to hit the rush hour traffic to Sheffield as it is. If we could waste as little time as possible I’d appreciate it.” He turned on his heel and walked away, the gravel crunching crisply underfoot.

“He’s grieving,” Willow said again, gently.

Gunn watched him go, all ramrod straight, and a big empty space inside him where living people were meant to be. There was no part of him that didn’t know how that felt. “Aren’t we all?” he said quietly.

***

Wesley awoke with a start and the sound came again, the squeak of something snatched up in feathered talons. He got up and went to the window. It was a full moon and the gardens were blue-lit, every tree and bush ablaze with silver. No doubt if Illyria had been visiting she could have told him about more beauteous worlds that she had overwhelmed with her might; vast kingdoms conquered and set aflame while she bestrode their fallen armies like a colossus. But he wondered if she had truly seen anything more beautiful than the silhouette of that old oak with the full moon behind it, or the white pillar of a weeping birch, its leaves shivering silver in the breeze. He wondered if this was the real reason why Giles had insisted on bringing him here; as if the landscape alone could heal him with its familiarity. He could hear the stream that ran through the woods from here, the sound of its shallows over stones. The yew would be a vast darkness in the moonlight, half-hollowed out with age; a place where Fred might be waiting.

“She’s not there, Wes.”

The voice was a shock sharper than a swordpoint. He turned slowly, hardly daring to breathe, and then the air gushed out of him in sheer disbelief. 

That slow familiar smile as the man stepped out of the shadows into the moonlight so that Wes could see for himself that he was whole and here. 

“Angel…?” His laugh was incredulous and he sounded half-unhinged but he couldn’t help his delight and disbelief showing. “Illyria said she didn’t know where you were.”

The vampire shrugged. “We got separated. I guess she has her own atonement to work through. Not that I can see her being big on atonement. That would probably clash with her whole ‘when you were muck’ thing.”

Wesley darted forward. “Are you…human…?”

The vampire shook his head. “Fraid not, Wes. Not yet. Apparently I still have tasks to perform. Are they looking after you okay?”

“Yes, of course. Gunn’s in the next room, do you want me to fetch him?”

Angel shook his head. “No, I can’t stay long. I just wanted to see how you were, let you know I wasn’t dusted in that alley.”

“Is Spike okay?”

Angel rolled his eyes. “Who cares?”

“Well, I think Buffy might and Willow and Giles would probably like to know.”

“Well, he’s not where I am, which makes me happy, but he didn’t die in the alley either. Still, it can’t all be good news.”

Wesley smiled despite himself. “I’m glad to see passing to the other side or the higher plane or wherever you’ve been hiding out hasn’t made you any less petty. Are you…?” He wasn’t sure how to phrase it. “Are you really you…?”

Angel looked hurt. “I’m not Angelus.”

“No, I mean, are you…you?”

“Who else would I be?” Angel sniffed the air and then gave him a look of reproach. “You didn’t?”

Wesley felt a twinge of guilt. “Didn’t what?”

“With Lilah, Wesley? That’s necrophilia.”

“Well, technically, it was necrophilia when you slept with Darla and when Buffy slept with you and I don’t imagine you were throwing that word around then.”

“What is it with you and walking corpses? Why don’t you just double date with Lilah and Illyria? Throw in a bottle of embalming fluid and you’re away.”

“Angel, please, that really is in the worst possible taste. And I’m not the only person to be tempted by walking corpses as I’m sure Buffy could testify.” He had to take a moment to drink the man in; the relief at finding that he had survived overwhelming. “How did you find us? Did you see Cordelia?”

Angel took a glowing sphere out of his pocket. “No, the Oracles gave me some kind of mystical tracking device. It’s linked to your soul-waves or something. Brought me straight here. I told them I wasn’t going off on some damned vision quest without seeing for myself that you were okay.” Angel pocketed the sphere and squeezed his shoulders lightly, that smile as warm as a winter fire. “I really thought I’d lost you. Is Gunn okay? He was bleeding pretty badly…”

“He’s fine,” Wesley assured him. “Willow’s been healing him. I’m fine too. Well…” He thought about telling Angel that he was so confused at the moment that he wasn’t even sure that the vampire was real, and then decided that Angel really didn’t need to be bothered by those kind of doubts right now. “I still miss Fred and Cordelia.”

Angel squeezed his shoulders again. “You and me both, Wes. Sure you’re okay? You look tired.”

“I’m still on LA time. When you travel by ordinary jet plane instead of direct transportation it’s a little difficult to adjust.”

Angel opened his hand and the sphere glowed more brightly, a swirl of white and crimson. “Hey, this thing is no picnic either. You know me and technology.”

“Are you…all right?” Wesley pressed anxiously. “You’re really on an astral plane, not a…?”

“Hell dimension?” Angel grimaced. “I think I may have to travel through one. The Powers seem to need a champion to perform all kinds of fun tasks for them. How come objects of power are never just lost in the umbrella stand like in the old days anyway?”

“Don’t you need to research where you’re going?” Wesley asked anxiously, already looking around for books. “If you’re going to the equivalent of Quor’toth you should really know what you’re up against. Sometimes the fabric between different dimensions can be as thin as paper, even a slight deviation from a set path can…”

“Don’t fuss,” Angel reassured him. “I’m going to be fine. I’ve got my glowy sphere thing, a sword that’s impressively big and shiny and can cut through the walls between demon worlds, and then there’s the whole ‘my strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure’ thing I have going for me.”

Wesley felt his anxiety recede a little and the relief and happiness well up that Angel was still alive and still serving the Powers; that his last stand hadn’t cost him his soul or his destiny. “Did the Powers talk about your reward, Angel?”

“It can’t be for the reward, Wes.” Angel gazed into his eyes with all the old tenderness, the memories between them of the time when they had been separated by so much grief and rage just making this time of perfect understanding more precious. “Remember? If nothing that we do matters…?”

“Then all that matters is what we do?” Wesley sighed. “I know you can’t want that reward, Angel. I know it has to be about the work, about the people you save, but I can still want it for you.”

“I know you do, Wesley. And one day maybe we’ll both be able to take a walk in the sunlight, but it’s not going to happen yet.” He reached out and clasped Wesley on the shoulder, still gazing intently into his eyes. “Someone has to fight the good fight, right? Tell Gunn I was asking after him, and take care of yourself…” And then Angel stepped out of the window and dropped gracefully onto the lawn, before walking along the path, a tall dark figure, his coat flapping behind, bathed in moonlight. He walked under the weeping willow and then passed into the woods where Wesley could no longer see him. He kept on looking, of course, still hoping to see a last glimpse, but even though he could make out nothing but the fields of silver grass and the dark shadows of the trees, in his heart was now the knowledge that he and Gunn weren’t the only ones to survive their battle with the Black Thorn.

***

##### 3: Harrogate

> Excess of grief for the dead is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not.  
>  Xenophon

The Haven Tea Shop was situated on a side street ten minutes walk from a municipal car park. Miranda had drawn him a map on the back on an envelope and Giles had followed it through the complications of traffic lights and zebra crossings that had led to an oblong of dusty concrete and those ubiquitous oblong white squares. He and Miranda had joked in the past that aliens would assume that car parks were places of worship for metallic creatures who gathered there for sacred occasions while their captive bipeds were released for a short walk, paying tribute on their way out of the car church in the upright metal equivalent of a poor box. Being that childish felt like something that had happened a long time ago and would almost certainly never happen again.

Giles ducked under the purple plumes of a wild buddleia, bright with small tortoiseshells and cabbage whites, and wondered if Alicia had ever parked in this space. It made sense that she might have done, especially at night. The white rectangle on the grey tarmac stood under shade and yet close to an old fashioned street light, making it safer than most parking places. He wondered idly if that black iron light was a retro Victorian refit for the tourists, or something that had somehow survived two world wars.

“No, Wes, we’re going to leave the books for now. Pick them up in a little while.” 

Giles turned to find Gunn trying to get Wesley to put back the books he was carrying. They had explained the situation to Wesley last night over dinner. Giles had decided that if no spells could be used the only way forward was to treat Wesley as if he were normal. So, he had shown him a photograph of Alicia, introduced him once again to Miranda and made him shake hands like a civilized human being – which, he had to admit, Wesley had done quite politely – and then explained that they were going to Harrogate to investigate Alicia’s murder and that of the two other women from Knaresborough. He had mentioned Exodus 22 and the Malleus Maleficarum and Wesley had looked at him blankly for what had felt like a very long time before saying:

“But ‘Chasaph’ doesn’t mean ‘witch’. It means ‘poisoner’. It was only translated as ‘witch’ to keep James the First happy because he was paranoid about witches. Reginald Scott rebutted it in The Discoverie of Witchcraft.” Wesley was already getting to his feet to look for the book.

“We know that, Wesley.” Giles caught him by the arm and pulled him back down into his chair again, already feeling this was probably something he should not have attempted to discuss with Wesley in front of Miranda. “But that didn’t prevent any number of witches from being burned in the past, and as it was quoted it seems to have been a factor in Alicia’s death. Of course, it could be sleight of hand, an old boyfriend trying to conceal his motive, but the murder of the other two women seems to tell against that theory.”

“Were they all drained of blood?”

Giles gritted his teeth. “Let’s talk about the details later, Wesley.” _When the mother of the murdered girl isn’t sitting four feet away from you, you insensitive berk_.

“Can you pass me the potatoes, Wesley?” Willow asked in a clear attempt to distract him.

He looked at her for a moment and then at the potatoes and then handed them to her in something that Giles supposed was at least an approach to normality.

Wesley dug his fork into his plate of vegetable lasagne as if he was going to go through the motions of eating to keep everyone else happy but couldn’t really see the point of it. “It’s just an awful lot of blood.”

“We’ll talk about this later,” Giles snapped at him. “All you need to keep in mind is that we’re going to Harrogate tomorrow and I’d appreciate it if you could pack some overnight things and be ready first thing in the morning.”

“I’ll help him with that,” Gunn said quickly. “We’ll get packed and ready tonight. Don’t worry.”

The rest of the meal had passed in a solemn silence until Miranda had given up her attempt to eat with them and run from the room, great gulps of grief reverberating through her.

Wesley had watched her go and said: “Love can be a terrible thing.”

“No, the untimely death of an innocent girl is a terrible thing, Wesley,” Giles heard himself saying through a throat raw with anger. He nodded to Willow and Gunn as he rose to his feet. “Excuse me.” He had spent the rest of the evening with Miranda, dreading coming to this place and having to see Alicia’s possessions, her little hopes and fragile dreams, all rendered irrelevant by the malice or mania of someone he had promised her mother he would find.

The only consolation on the journey up had been that Gunn was having a worst time than he was. They were just out of the inevitable traffic crawl past Sheffield when Wesley had asked the man out of the blue:

“Do you think Fred loved me?”

Gunn looked at him in shock. “Of course she did, man.”

“But how can you tell? Perhaps she was wrong? Perhaps she just thought she did. She didn’t have all of her memories at the time. Perhaps it was a mistake.”

“The only mistake between you and Fred was the two of you taking so long to get around to it and I know I had a part to play in that and I’m sorry. And I’m sorry about what happened to Fred.”

Wesley looked genuinely perplexed. “I just don’t know why she would.”

On another day Giles would have felt sorry for Gunn at that point but he was actually feeling horrible enough to enjoy someone else having an even worse ten minutes than he was. 

“Wes, trust me, she loved you. You and Fred would have been great together.”

Wesley gazed at Gunn curiously for a moment. “Do you love me?”

Gunn darted a look of horrified embarrassment at Giles who was barely able not to smirk at him in the rearview mirror. “Well, not like Fred but…yeah, man, I love you. Just don’t want to be getting sweaty and naked with you.”

“Why?” Wesley kept gazing at him unblinkingly.

“Why don’t I want to be getting sweaty and naked with you…?”

“Why do you love me?”

Gunn swallowed. “I just do.”

“But there has to be a reason.”

“No, there doesn’t. It’s one of those things. Sometimes you just love people and that’s the way it is and you can’t change it. And sometimes you go on loving them even when you don’t even like them any more. But then one day you have to admit you still love them and you never stopped loving them and they never stopped loving you either. And that’s what family is.”

Wesley looked down at the books he held and then back at Gunn. “Do you think Fred loved me because she thought I was safe?”

Gunn seemed to be mentally counting to ten. “Wes, you chased Fred with an axe. You knocked Lorne unconscious. You kidnapped Connor. You slept with Lilah. You fed Angel your own blood when you knew he was starving and wanted to kill you. You let out Angelus and you broke a psychotic Slayer out of jail. Not to mention shooting one guy in the kneecap, another in the heart, and stabbing me. If you were any less safe you’d come with a government health warning, so, no, Fred didn’t love you because you were ‘safe’, she loved you because you’re you. Which – before we have to get into it – is why I love you too. It’s just one of those great unexplained mysteries, like the pyramids, okay?”

“Do you think Angel loved me?”

Gunn rolled his eyes. “Of course he loved you.”

“Why?”

“Because you loved him and you needed him to love you, and the only thing Angel likes as much as being loved is being needed. That’s why he never loved me, because I didn’t need him to. Now can we please talk about something that doesn’t have an off the scale embarrassment factor?”

They had driven the rest of the way in silence.

Giles suspected that half of the time when Wesley started a conversation it was – from his perspective – the other half of a dialogue he had been having with someone else, but as they were not privy to those conversations it was becoming very difficult to predict what he would do or say next. Looking over his shoulder now he noticed that Gunn had hold of Wesley’s arm, presumably in case those voices in Wesley’s head told him that a fun thing to do would be to play in traffic. Wesley was carrying a book so he guessed Gunn had given in or bartered him down to one leather-bound volume. He wondered if they were going to have to steer him past the sweets at the supermarket checkout counters from now on to avoid temper tantrums.

An image of Alicia presented itself to him in slightly grainy colour, as if it should be accompanied by the whirl of an old cine-camera; a three year old, triumphant in her pushchair, wearing some ridiculous little duffle coat and red Wellington boots, the gloves she refused to wear dangling from pieces of elastic through her sleeves, chocolate smeared on her face from the bar for which she had successfully bartered in the local Fine Fare. He remembered flying saucers of rice paper, mint humbugs in their see-through wrappers; a quarter of sherbet lemons out of the sweet jars behind the counter, handed to her surreptitiously in a twist of white paper because he didn’t like carob either.

“Giles? Are you okay?” 

Willow was looking at him in concern. 

“Of course.” He pretended to consult the map Miranda had given him. “Just getting my bearings. Down here, I think.”

Willow matched her strides to his while behind them Gunn was coaxing Wesley away from a second-hand bookshop whose window display had caught his attention. 

“It’s okay not to be okay,” she offered tentatively. “Under the circumstances it’s even…normal.”

“I think Wesley has commandeered the crazy allowance for everyone for the moment.” He hadn’t meant to sound so terse. 

But Willow had evidently known him for too long to be put off by him doing what Buffy called his Oscar the Grouch routine. She slipped her arm through his and he found himself unexpectedly touched by the contact, and more by her knowledge that to be touched by someone with kindness was something he needed right now. 

“Breaking stuff is also acceptable,” Willow said conversationally. “And cursing out other drivers.”

“I thought I did some of that on the way up?”

“I thought you were very restrained,” she confided. They walked along the cracked pavement past a specialist delicatessen that would not have looked out of place in London. “You know Buffy would come right away if…”

“No.” He patted her hand where it rested on his arm. “If anyone deserves a break, it’s her.”

“I’m not sure why.” Willow pouted in a way that Giles had to admit if only privately he found perfectly adorable. “She’s the only one of us having regular sex right now.”

“And we did talk about hell having frozen over before I want to know about any of your sex lives, didn’t we? It’s bad enough having to listen to Wesley getting Gunn to declare his undying love for him.” 

She sniggered next to him. “Poor Gunn.”

“Just reassure me that Dawn isn’t dating?”

Willow grimaced and then widened her eyes in a show of transparent truth-telling. “Absolutely. She’s actually thinking about becoming a nun.”

“Oh dear lord, don’t let her do that. I always associate convents with Angelus.”

“Becoming – staying celibate, I mean. Forever.”

He nodded. “Excellent. Now if you and Buffy could just follow her example, that would suit me admirably.”

“Well, I only date girls now, and that’s not as bad, is it? I thought it was only boys it was wrong to date? Because of the penises.”

“It’s not as bad,” Giles conceded. “But it still comes a very poor second to a life of celibacy and temporal reflection.”

Willow frowned. “Thinking about time?”

“No, Willow – temporal as in secular. Have you heard from Xander, by the way?”

“Yes, he’s fine. He sounds a lot more like…Xander.”

“He is being careful, isn’t he? There are some very powerful umthakathi near his region. I hope you reminded him not to touch any death masks.”

“He’s definitely avoidy with the death masks. Also the witchcraft and voodoo and invocations to raise demons.”

“I’m very relieved to hear it. Tell him to take care of himself, won’t you?”

Willow bit her lip. “I will.”

Not looking at her, Giles added conversationally: “You’re going to have to expect a heightened level of paranoia about you all for a while. You know that, yes?”

“I already sent out the Defcon Five warning to Buffy and Dawn.”

“Good. Because if anything were to happen to any of the rest of you right now…” He didn’t finish the sentence, just waving a hand. “Just…don’t do anything unusually reckless or careless or in any way dangerous.”

“I promise.”

“And you can’t have any pets.”

She looked at him in confusion. “Because they could get run over and that would be…sad?”

“No, because it’s on the lease agreement. I’m just trying to head off any arguments before they begin. Gunn strikes me as the sort who’ll want to get a dog ten minutes over the threshold.”

The words ‘Haven Tea Shop’ were more of a shock than they should have been. They were inevitably going to have to reach this place at some point, after all. He had just walked a route that Alicia must have walked a thousand times, aware of her with every step, despite being here to investigate her murder, still expecting to see her across the road, hair untidy and unbound, struggling with carrier bags, a point of brightness in some multi-coloured sweater. But breaking down wasn’t an option, or doing as Wesley had done and side-stepping reality altogether. Miranda needed answers and closure, and so did he, and if the people who had murdered Alicia were part of some kind of witch-hating cult then there would be other young women in this city who needed protection.

He took a deep breath and forced a smile that he suspected was fooling no one. “Well, here we are then.” And then he was walking through the door Alicia must have used so many times before and stepping into the Tea Shop in which she had spent the last day of her life.

***

Willow liked the tearoom as soon as they stepped into it, all those dark wooden tables arranged with pretty white cotton cloths and posies of flowers in little vases, salt and pepper cellars waiting in their little silver ‘cruets’, blue and white striped sugar bowls with heaps of golden brown granules or proper white cubes. She liked the home-made cakes under the glass, and the cheese scones, and the smell of baking they left behind, and the chalkboard with the soup of the day – broccoli and stilton – written up on it in white capitals. She liked how it was so English and quaint and how Giles and Wesley didn’t even notice it was either of those things; as if they had never even been to California; as if this was the real world, of course, and always had been, and now they were back in it again. 

She wanted to hug Gunn for looking so wonderfully out of place, ducking heavy beams as if they were out to get him, his fingers reaching for the handle of an axe he didn’t own any more; gazing around suspiciously at the local watercolours with their prices stuck onto their pale wood frames as if anything that looked this tame had to be demonic somehow. Wesley had started examining the chalk written menu while a woman in a delightfully frilly apron came out from the back to see if Giles was the person she hoped he was. She had clearly been crying. Willow liked her for that right away. 

Giles’s quiet formal murmur: “Mrs Philips? I believe Miranda called to tell you we were on the way…? I’m Rupert Giles, this is Willow Rosenberg, Charles Gunn, and Wesley what are you doing…?”

Wesley looked at Giles as if he was perhaps on some kind of medication, and said very clearly so there could be no possible confusion: “Asking for a cup of tea. I’m thirsty.”

Giles reached for his wallet and wordlessly handed Gunn a five pound note. “Will you…?”

Gunn didn’t look very sure of the note, examining the pictures on it as if it were Monopoly money. Willow remembered that she had to show Gunn a British Monopoly board soon so they could exclaim together over the way all the names were different. Giles had never been able to grasp how interesting that was. Gunn handed the note over to the woman behind the counter, who had also been crying.

“No, no, you don’t need to pay. Just give them what they want, Jean.” The woman who had greeted Giles, waved a hand to the other woman behind the counter. “You’re here to help Alicia. You don’t pay for anything here.”

Willow noticed the way the woman had said ‘help’, even though the girl was beyond help. ‘Avenge’ was too gothic. ‘Investigate what happened to’ too clinical. ‘Help’ didn’t even need to acknowledge that the girl was gone; as if she were only trapped in limbo somewhere, and still in need of their assistance. Willow thought about the unendurable weight of grief, and how clever the mind was in finding ways to sidestep the impossible truth that someone who had been completely here was now entirely gone. The subconscious did magic tricks for the first few weeks to distract the mind and eye, and then, unendurable loss or not, the living found themselves still living and the dead still dead.

As he was handed back the five pound note, Wesley juggled the book he held to take it, saying ‘Thank you’ before looking at it in confusion. “I’m sure they used to be bigger than this.”

Gunn took it from him and then turned him back to the woman behind the counter. “Tell the lady what you want, Wes.” As Wesley still looked as if they were all behaving very oddly, Gunn sighed and leaned past him, unexpectedly pulling out a dazzling smile, under the influence of which the middle-aged woman behind the counter visibly gave at the knees. “Could you get him a cup of English Breakfast tea? No sugar. Not too strong. And he likes it made in the pot if that’s not too much trouble?”

After that smile of Gunn’s, Willow suspected flying out to India to collect the leaves by hand wouldn’t have seemed like too much trouble. The woman fluttered and then rallied enough to say: “I’ll bring you all up a pot on a tray. Would you like some macaroons with that? They’re fresh out of the oven.”

Another smile from Gunn that would have lit up a coal cellar like a lighthouse beam. “That would be wonderful.” He held out a hand. “Charles Gunn, by the way.”

“Jean Roper.” She took Gunn’s hand tentatively and he gave her a firm-but-not-crushing handshake while gazing straight into her eyes in the manner of the heroes of the romantic novels Willow had read in the past. She decided that Gunn could be a great asset if they had to interview straight women or gay men. That smile definitely had some mileage in it.

When she turned her attention back to Giles she found he was deep in conversation with Judith Philips, Alicia’s landlady, who was eager to be as much use as she could. 

“She was never any trouble. Such a warm, friendly girl. Not stand-offish at all – she helped out here so many times when I was short-staffed, watched my daughter’s youngest when she couldn’t get a babysitter. None of us can believe it, can we, Jean?”

Jean wiped her eyes in an immediate outpouring of what seemed to be genuine grief. “No one can. It just seems so senseless. Who would do something like that to a girl?”

“That’s what we’re here to find out, Mrs Philips,” Giles said quietly. Willow thought that if a policeman had said that it might just sound like something they had to say, but when Giles said those words they felt like a pact he’d just made, like he’d given her a promise that was written on vellum and sealed in blood and wax. There was a look in his green eyes she hadn’t seen in a long time, and for all the shadows beneath them and the grinding exhaustion of his sorrow, he looked like the man who had stood up to her when she was possessed by magic, who wouldn’t back down before a hurricane or an all-powerful witch driven insane by grief. 

Judith nodded her head. “I’ll be very grateful to you if you can, Mr. Giles.”

“Please, my friends call me ‘Giles’. I believe you said that my colleagues and I could have the use of Alicia’s flat while we conduct our investigation…?”

“Of course. It’s just up the stairs. It’s got a sofabed in the sitting room and there are two bedrooms. Not that she used the second one for sleeping. She had it as an office for when she was writing her essays but there’s a camp bed in there. Did you know she was taking a teacher training course?”

“Her mother told me, yes.”

“She had so much patience. I always told her she was a natural born teacher. She could make my grand-children behave like no one else I know.” She wiped her eyes again. “It just seems like such a waste, doesn’t it?”

Giles’ face was grim. “It really does.”

Judith lowered her voice, leaning towards Giles as she nodded to Gunn and Wesley. “Are they all right sharing?”

Giles opened his mouth to say one thing and then waved a dismissive hand. “We’ll sort something out, please don’t worry about it.”

“I’ll bring you up that tea in a moment,” Jean told Gunn. “Would you like some sandwiches? Egg and cress? Or we’ve got some nice local ham. Home-baked bread, of course.”

“We really wouldn’t want to put you to any more trouble,” Giles said.

She shook her head. “Oh, it’s no trouble.”

Willow watched Gunn collect Wesley from where he seemed likely to wander off to look at the watercolours, gripping his sleeve firmly and saying: “This way, Wes.” 

As she followed Giles up the stairs to Alicia’s apartment Willow looked over her shoulder at Gunn to say innocently: “And if we start to run low on funds we can always hire you out as a gigolo.”

Wesley snorted and Gunn gave him a withering look. “That you choose to understand?” Wesley dropped his gaze back to the book he was still carrying but Willow could see that he was still sniggering.

Gunn looked dignified. “My mom always told me that manners cost nothing.”

“Being all tall and gorgeous and flirting like a film star probably doesn’t hurt either,” she pointed out. “Do you even know what a macaroon is?”

Gunn conceded the point with a shrug while Wesley chose that moment to look straight at Willow as if he were the sanest person on the planet and say: “They’re flat almond-flavoured cakes cooked on edible rice paper. They’re very nice.”

Gunn gave him a look of surprise. “You rejoining us on Planet Earth, Wes?”

“Angel seems to think this is real,” he explained.

Gunn sighed in defeat and ran a hand over the smooth skin of his skull, glancing up at Willow as the weariness washed over his face. “Whatever.”

She gave him an encouraging smile, trying to cheer him up. “At least he remembers what macaroons are.”

 

Willow could feel the presence of the dead girl as she stepped through the door. Not a ghost haunting the room, just the quiet echoes that the living left behind, the feel of a room vacated by someone who had been intending to return. She suspected Wesley could too. He seemed to be on the cusp of this world and the one beyond at the moment. If Giles and Gunn had not been quite so hyper-protective she would have asked him to describe exactly what he was seeing, to get a better feel for exactly what his hallucinations were; an ability to see through the veil that separated this world and the next, or just a Freudian projection of the things he most needed to see and hear.

Alicia had left what Willow presumed was her coursework open on the table, a stack of books piled up next to it. An empty coffee mug of the same blue and white striped pottery as the sugar bowls downstairs stood next to a pen. There was an inside-out sweater tossed onto the sofa-bed; Willow had done that herself in the last minute rush to get out on time, weighing up whether a jacket would be enough or if a sweater was needed. The room was still redolent of a life interrupted and waiting to resume; a faint scent of sagebrush in the air from the dabs of oil Alicia must have applied before she headed out for the last time.

Giles turned and walked into the kitchen and Willow caught Gunn’s arm when he would have followed him. “I think he needs to be alone.”

Gunn nodded his understanding and turned back to Wesley who was looking at the books on the home-made shelving of planks arranged on bricks. “She was studying witchcraft.” Wesley took a book from the shelf and opened it. Gunn crouched down next to him to look through the books as well and Willow risked a glance towards the kitchen. Giles still looked as if he needed to be alone, so she took the bathroom. It was painted white and smelt of oranges and lavender from bath salts and chunky brown bars of hand-made soap. Willow picked up an orange bottle of bath salts and inhaled the spicy scent of them, and then stroked her fingers across soap that had a delicate stalk of lavender impressed into its surface. She put it down gently so that it was in exactly the same place. Light poured in through the small square window and onto the mirror over the sink and she wondered if Wesley would be able to step in here without lowering the blind just in case Angel should visit. She had noticed him doing it in the Cotswolds, wincing at rooms with open drapes and surreptitiously closing them until the sun had truly gone down. Giles hadn’t noticed and she didn’t think Gunn had realized either, they had just kept walking into rooms and wondering why they were so dark during the daytime. A couple of times, Giles had impatiently yanked open the drapes, but he didn’t seem to have connected their closed state to Wesley.

A hairbrush had been left on the shelf by the mirror, strands of fair hair trailing from it. It sparked a memory of Tara’s hairbrush looking exactly like that; the plain wooden handle and those strands of hair snagged in the bristles, so fine that they were almost invisible until the sun caught them. She picked up the brush gingerly and held it where the light could stream through the trailing strands, and when the tears sprang into her eyes she wasn’t sure if it was this girl she had never met and now never would or Tara that she was mourning.

A sound behind her made her spin around, hastily wiping her eyes. Seeing it was Giles, his face a mask of grief, the tears welled up again. “Oh, Giles, I’m so sorry.”

He came forward. “I know.”

“I can still sense her here. I would have liked her so much.”

“I’m sure you would.”

She wanted to hug him but he had never been very comfortable with hugging. She had never been able to decide if it was his position as a teacher that meant he didn’t like touching any of them or just the whole being English thing. She patted him gingerly instead.

He snatched a breath and then said a little hoarsely: “In a town of seventy thousand people, and a town, moreover, so close to Brimham Rocks there must be a number of witches. We need to find the people who killed Alicia before they find anyone else.”

She wiped her eyes again, trying to look something other than so sorry for him that it was overwhelming every other thought. “What do you want me to do?”

“Miranda has given me the name of a wicca group here in Harrogate which Alicia attended. I think they might be more at ease talking to you than me. Would you mind following up on that? See if they know anything? I’ll take Alicia’s address book, see if I can find out anything about a boyfriend or if they know who she was meeting that night.”

“What about Wesley and Gunn?” She just knew Gunn wasn’t going to be happy to sit this one out. He just wasn’t a sitting-things-out kind of person. He had been bleeding to death when he had walked away from his assignment and yet instead of calling himself an ambulance – as ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have done – he had not walked but run to a meeting place in a rain-drenched alley because that was where the next battle was going to be fought.

Giles seemed to realize that too. “Perhaps they can…”

“We need to look up spells.”

Giles jumped as Wesley appeared behind him. “Wesley, don’t sneak up on people like that…” He made a conscious effort to swallow the rest of his sentence, reaching for his patience. “What kind of spells?”

Wesley looked at him as if it were so obvious he was surprised he was being asked to state it. “Spells that need a lot of the blood of witches.”

***

Gunn sat down on the double bed and smoothed out the coverlet. He had pulled the drapes open after someone had closed them again. It felt all kinds of weird being in this dead girl’s room, contemplating sleeping in her bed. Changing the linen wasn’t enough to get rid of the scent of her shampoo and perfume and talcum powder, and the thing was she’d expected to be coming back. That was what the whole room was screaming at him; she’d just gone out for the evening, that was all. She hadn’t been fighting vampires or demons or taking on an evil law firm, she’d just been going out to meet a friend someplace and now this room was waiting and waiting and she wasn’t ever coming home. 

There were books everywhere, not just novels, poetry and plays too. Used ones, mostly, and softcovers, some of them with their original prices still printed on them. ‘5s net’. Shillings, Giles had told him. The equivalent of five new pence or twelve old pence. Twelve pence going into five pence didn’t work with any fractions that Gunn knew; damn but these people had needed decimalization badly. He opened the book on the top of the pile by her bed. Still expecting the dead girl to tell them something about who had killed her. He glanced down the page quickly, letting sentences catch him unawares, as if that made them truths.

_This would not be the war we fought in. See, the foliage is heavier, there were no hills of that size there._

_But I find it impossible not to look for actual persons known to me and not seen since; impossible not to look for myself._

Gunn closed his eyes briefly. _No, don’t tell me about me. Tell me about who killed you?_

A last attempt at enlightenment through illogical hocus pocus of the kind he would never admit to practising to any living thing; not now the one person he could have shared it with had gone to join the dead. This was definitely only something he would ever tell Fred. She could make anything scientific and logical, even things that were crazy. If she were here right now she’d even be able to find a word for what Wesley was that made it seem okay. Willow had some of that quality about her, too, and he was starting to find it all kinds of comforting. Then he thought of Fred in that bed, surrounded by men who loved her but who hadn’t managed to save her. The way she’d looked at them as if they would be bound to find a solution, because they were all her heroes and her brothers, and there was nothing to fear as long as they were close by. 

_Someone has that war stored up in metal canisters, a memory he cannot use, somewhere my innocence is proven with my guilt, but this would not be the war I fought in._

He closed the book, trying not to feel as if he’d let down another girl who needed him to save her. He’d been in a hospital bed in St Matthews when Alicia had been murdered, and yet what had it all been for, everything he had done since he had decided you either picked up a crucifix and went to church and prayed really hard or you picked up a fuckin’ stake and rammed it straight into the heart of the next undead son-of-a-bitch you found? Everything he had done and Angel had done and Wes and Cordy and Fred and Lorne had done to make the world a better place, and people just kept dying. And maybe this was how cops felt, like what the fuck was the point if they worked their asses off every day and innocent girls still ended up dead?

Maybe Wes could have conjured up a nice comforting hallucination right now, but Gunn had a memory come to him instead. Sitting up in that hospital bed with this dark hole inside him that could never be filled because what he’d done could never be undone. Realizing this must be how Angel felt every single day and wondering how, if he did, he didn’t just stake himself and make this feeling go away. Angel standing by his bedside and Gunn not wanting to even meet his eye, or anyone’s eye, ever again; remembering that cold deranged dislike in Wesley’s eyes, the man so measured in his revenge as he’d stuck that scalpel in his gut.

_I understand not wanting to go back, not wanting to be who we were. I understand it. And I can forgive it. But you knew what was happening to her. You knew who was responsible and you didn't say anything. You let her die. I'm less forgiving about that._

He flinched at the memory, rubbing his face over his hands as if he could brush it away. Angel standing at the end of his bed looking as if he wasn’t going to give him an inch, wasn’t ever going to forgive him either and then those words that were so matter-of-fact, so painful, so much what he needed to hear:

_I know you feel bad about your part in what happened to Fred. And you should. For the rest of your life, it should wake you up in the middle of the night. And it will...because you're a good man. You signed a piece of paper, that's all._

_But I knew. Not about Fred, but...when I signed, I knew there would be consequences._

_You know, the thing about atonement is, you never run out of chances... but you gotta take 'em. You can't hide hide in some hospital room and pretend it's all gonna go away... 'cause it never will._

Gunn straightened back up, looking at the sun floating in on a swirl of dust, the mirror with the cards and photographs stuck around the edge, the framed photographs on the sideboard, the books and pens and pile of clothes dumped on a chair. All the things this girl had left behind, who, if she couldn’t be saved, could at least be avenged.

“No, it never does, does it, Angel? It never goes away.” He went out into the sitting room where Wesley was researching something at the girl’s table. He would have found it hard not to treat the place like a shrine, tip-toeing around her possessions, but Wesley had cleared her books away and found a new notebook from somewhere and was working in that. For the sake of Giles’ mental health, that was probably the right approach, but it still looked callous. And there was the whole matter of Giles looking as if he had come that close to punching Wesley once already today. Gunn was really hoping he and Giles could learn to get along without butting heads, but if Giles hit Wesley, Gunn was going to have to hit him back, just because, and he really wanted to avoid that if he could.

“Wes, I don’t know if we should be moving her stuff yet. Giles may want to do that himself.”

Wesley looked up at him for one of those long strange pauses where Wesley seemed to be trying to work out who Gunn was, at least he guessed that was what it was about, that intent stare before he answered him.

“Would you rather have your possessions preserved exactly where you left them or the people who killed you brought to justice?”

Gunn shrugged. “Change ‘brought to justice’ to ‘chopped up into little bitty pieces’ and I’m there.”

“They didn’t just cut her throat and leave her to bleed to death. They captured the blood in some kind of receptacle.”

It was definitely better that Wesley said this kind of thing when Giles wasn’t around or Giles was going to hit him for sure. “So?” he prompted.

Wesley held up an exercise book. “This was inside her course work. She wasn’t writing an essay about Structuralism, after all. She was working on some spells. I don’t think she can have been much more than a dabbler in the magical arts because these are very basic spells. I imagine her powers were quite weak. That might be why they needed so much of her blood.”

“Wes, I get that you’re just doing your job but it’s probably not a good idea to talk about that girl’s blood in front of Giles. Okay?”

“He has an emotional connection, I understand that.” Wesley looked back at the books in front of him. “I remember feeling that.”

Gunn felt a stab of hurt at that ‘remember’. He had never really known how Wesley felt about him after the death of Fred. There had been that long cold year of enmity between them, but that had felt like it was more on his side than Wesley’s. That was partly what annoyed him so much. Wes was there making eyes at Fred without wanting to pay the price for it, not wanting to come right out and tell Gunn that if it came down to making off with his girl or getting his friendship back, Gunn’s friendship was nowhere, but still wanting to look like the good guy in front of Fred, the one who was ready to be friends again. Then they’d done all kinds of…bonding under the influence of Jasmine, and even after all the warm fuzzy love had been banished and they were running for their lives from the army of the indoctrinated, he had still cared about Wesley just as much. It had felt as if their friendship was the only thing that had come through their time as possessed worshippers of a rogue goddess unscathed. 

Even in Wolfram & Hart, there had been distance, it was true; Gunn had believed in what they were doing, making the machinery work for them, felt empowered by the new knowledge in his head; whereas Wesley had still only seemed to believe in Angel; but Gunn had felt they were still keeping the friendship going. And then had come Fred’s death and that scalpel in his guts and maybe that had been the time for them to both cut their losses. But it was never that damned simple with family. And by that point they were the only family they had left: Gunn, Wesley, Angel, Lorne, hell, even Spike and Illyria had been members, whatever back door they had come in by. Which was maybe why Wesley had sent Illyria to break Gunn out of hell and why Gunn hadn’t felt even a twinge of resentment when Wesley had made him that half-assed apology from his window seat on the crazy train. So he’d known he still cared about Wesley, even a Wesley who had stabbed him, even a Wesley who was at least half-insane, drunk as often as not, and so exhausted with grief that the kindest thing anyone could have done for him was take a leaf out of deranged Angel’s book and hold a pillow over his face until he stopped kicking. The thing with Wesley was that he was a functioning crazy person, just like he was a functioning drunk; stick him full of single malt and shut him in a room with the walking corpse of the woman who had loved him and there would still be a part of him problem-solving like the sanest Watcher on the planet. Supposing Watchers actually came in sane.

Which meant that even if he was seeing Illyria and Cordy and Christ knew what else dancing around him all day long, it didn’t mean there wasn’t some part of his brain that was working perfectly well. Which could also mean that he felt no emotional connection to Gunn any more but that he might still be capable of solving this case.

“He knew this girl since she was a baby. It would be like people talking to us about…Fred’s organs melting like it wasn’t important.”

“Well, it isn’t now.” Wesley returned to the books, tone unexpectedly crisp. “She’s dead. Does the method really matter?”

“I seem to remember it mattered to you at the time.” He didn’t sound bitter because he wasn’t, but he did sound hurt because he guessed some part of him still was.

Wesley glanced up at him briefly. “I was irrational with grief.”

Gunn expelled a breath he seemed to have been holding in for a while. “Yeah, well, it’s good you’re over that.” He sat on the table and looked down at what Wesley was working on. His handwriting looked saner than the rest of him put together, all neat and tidy and in perfectly straight lines. “You got a theory?”

Wesley didn’t look up. “I already told you, I think they killed her for her blood.”

“What?” Gunn gaped at him. “That’s not what you said.”

“Didn’t I?”

“You said they might be using her blood for something, you didn’t say that was why she was killed.”

Wesley nodded solemnly. “I see your point. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. I shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Still, even if she were killed for reasons that were entirely personal, if the blood was sold to a cult of some kind then they would seem to be a starting place to work back to the murderer, wouldn’t you agree?”

Sighing, Gunn slid down from the table. “I think I should get the beds ready for everyone. Put away some of her stuff. You okay sharing cause I figure there’s no one else out of the four of us that probably can? I was thinking Willow should have the little room and Giles have the sofa bed – seeing as how I don’t think you or I would be comfortable sharing with him.”

There was a long pause before Wesley blinked and looked up at him again. “Didn’t we used to share?”

“At Cordy’s a couple of times when she took the couch.”

“And in the Hyperion?”

Gunn grimaced. “That was Jasmine-time, Wes, we don’t need to talk about that. That’s not relevant to now.”

Wesley picked up his pen and bent back over the books. “I remember that you snore.”

“Only when I’ve been drinking,” Gunn protested, indignant for the ten seconds it took until he realized that he and Wes had managed a conversation that was halfway sane. He patted him gingerly on his bony shoulder. “You stick with the hocus pocus research, okay? I’ll do the whole…domestic thing.”

When he looked back from the spare bedroom and that sad-looking little camp bed, Wesley was still turning pages and making notes. For the first time since he had woken up in the hospital bed, wondering where the alley and the rain and the damned dragon had got to and how in the name of all that was holy he wasn’t dead yet, Gunn wondered if maybe they could still find a way to do some good after all.

***

The sound of traffic was politely muted in the long dining room at the back of Rosemary’s house; a background murmur behind the jingling of the wind chimes. The French windows were open so they could gaze out into the garden in which it wasn’t quite warm enough to sit. Clouds swept across the square of mown glass at regularly spaced intervals; a breeze ruffling the leaves of the flowers and shrubs in the deep borders and rippling the surface of the little pond in which the red-orange glint of goldfish could just be glimpsed. Willow watched an unfamiliar bird alight on a stone birdbath and sip delicately from the greenish water. She took another nervous gulp of tea, and looked at the empty places in the room that no one had taken when they chose their chairs. She guessed she was probably sitting in a dead woman’s seat right now, on the edge of a couch that had looked more comfortable than it was; that careful space around the green velvet chair with the big tapestry cushion, only the newspaper on the comfortable-looking faded blue couch with the silk shawl draped over it.

The sense of mourning pervaded the room; also fear. Even if she hadn’t been a witch, she thought she could have picked that up. She remembered that feeling after she had found the dead boys in the home room; vampires invading their personal space and enjoying doing it. How it had felt as if nothing would ever be safe again. And how that hadn’t begun to compare with how she had felt when Angel had become Angelus; someone who knew them all so well and how to hurt them the most.

She took another sip of tea to gather her nerves and then leaned forward. “I know this must be very difficult for you, but if you could tell me anything…? Anything at all, that might throw some light on…”

A small bird-like woman in her forties darted her a sharp glance. “You claim to be a witch and you really don’t understand the misogynistic impulses that lead men to oppress empowered women? You don’t comprehend the castration-complex at the root of these crimes?”

Willow sighed. “I actually took psychology. I took it with a crazy teacher who was building a Frankenstein’s monster in a back room of her secret military demon-hunting operation, but I did take it. And those reasons are probably why some unbalanced men decided to kill your friends. But, just on the off chance that…”

“You think this has anything to do with magic?” the woman demanded contemptuously. “Do you think witches were burned because of magic? Do you think so-called ‘sorceresses’ are chopped up with machetes in Africa because of magic?”

“The police are looking for a cult of neo-Christian psychotics who have translated their fear of women into murdering them for any reason they can come up with in the Bible.” Willow could hear her voice rising slightly and worked to get it back down to the kind reasonable understanding tone that she always tried to use with Wesley. “As they’re exploring that angle already, I thought it might be worth taking a look at the other options, that’s all.”

“There are no other options.” The woman sat back in her chair with a flick of her hair, as if Willow were an insect that had just landed on her skin.

Willow reminded herself that fear always made people scratchy, but also decided that if she had to go on being the one who was always nice and tolerant and talking people down from their stressed-grieving-irrational place while everyone else got to act out, then she was probably going to need to indulge in some primal scream therapy before too long, or, perhaps, kick something.

“We don’t need to close our minds to possibilities, Joanna,” Rosemary said. “Isn’t that what this group is about? Being open to other ways of looking?”

“But this isn’t a game.” Joanna’s voice was so ragged with fear it reminded Willow of those visualization exercises they had done back in her old wicca group. Joanna was a paper kite with a snapped string snagged on a thorn bush right now. 

“What we do here isn’t a game either, Joanna.” The woman in the corner had hair henna’d an unlikely shade of orange and a deep soothing voice but had already talked about Willow’s aura rather more than Willow had enjoyed.

“Yes, it is,” Joanna snapped. “It’s not serious. It’s not…magical. And now Alicia and Karin and Dora are dead because of our stupid games.”

“Karin and Dora had genuine power, Joanna.”

“Oh, that’s nonsense.”

Willow sighed. On another day she might have wanted to explore why a woman came to a wicca group who didn’t believe in witchcraft but now she really didn’t have time for this denialist crap. 

“Karin came from a family of witches, Willow,” Rosemary told her. “The Prestons are famous in Knaresborough for their psychic abilities. They have been for generations. They’re supposed to be descended from Jennet Preston.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” Joanna snorted.

“What about Alicia?” Willow pressed.

Rosemary shrugged elegantly. “I can’t say I noticed anything unusual about her but Karin thought that she had some latent ability.”

Joanna said with a sneer: “I think we all know the real reason why Karin was interested in Alicia.”

Willow thought that Joanna was making herself very hard to love right now. The words oh yes, because it’s not as if a lesbian could ever want to be friends with another woman without wanting to jump her bones were having to be swallowed like ground glass.

“Giles thought so too. And her mother is quite a powerful witch so it seems likely that it would have been passed on. I just wondered if she had mentioned any specific spells?”

Rosemary looked a little shocked. “We don’t do ‘spells’ here, dear.”

“Research then?”

“She and Karin were researching something,” another woman put in. Willow was almost sure her name was Mary. She sounded tired and when the sunlight fell across her face as another cloud scudded by and passed on, Willow saw that her eyes were red-rimmed. “Dora thought there was some kind of…”

“Interruption in the Force,” Joanna said with heavy-handed sarcasm.

Mary ran a hand through her short blonded hair. “Karin said it was like knowing Pluto was there because of the irregularities in Neptune’s orbit. Not something sensed but an awareness of what one knew reacting to something else. She thought there might be some people casting spells of unusual power. She and Alicia were trying to work out where the spells were being cast and by whom. It seemed a very harmless interest for them.”

Willow thought of Sunnydale and how dangerous new sorcery could be if one felt it tingling the edges of one’s own awareness. In the world of herbal tea sipped from earthenware hand-thrown pottery, it had probably felt like an entertaining fantasy, but she had been one of the people who sensed that something was wrong and who tried to do something about it. The only difference between her and Karin and Alicia was that she had been able to do her investigating with a Slayer at her side.

“They were quite excited about it,” Rosemary conceded.

“Did they give any details to anyone?” Willow pressed. “Any idea of what was out there and how it…felt to them?”

Mary sighed. “I spoke to Karin on the phone the weekend before she… She said that she knew it was something particularly powerful because she couldn’t find it. She said that she and her grandmother had performed all the usual ‘revealing spells’ and nothing was showing up, and she thought their ‘energy’ might be wrong, so she was going to ask Alicia to help her in case that made a difference. I thought it was…rather silly. Something must be even more powerful than they thought it was because they couldn’t find it? It seemed like the worst kind of denial affirmation. I told her I had to get the Co-Op before all the Guardians sold out and I was stuck with The Times again.” She pressed a tissue to her eyes, her shoulders shaking before she snatched a breath. “I’m sorry, I just feel so incredibly guilty.”

“Unless you know any super-powerful witches who could have put helped them with that revealing spell, I don’t think it would have made any difference,” Willow reassured her.

“Oh please,” Joanna said shortly. “This is all such nonsense. Alicia, Karin and Dora were killed by misogynist psychopaths and that’s an end to it. And the sooner everyone here stops pretending to be a witch, the better her chances are of not ending up the same way until these people are caught.” She held Willow’s gaze. “And that goes for you too.”

Willow rose to her feet. “Don’t worry. I never pretend to be a witch. I should get back. One of my friends is quite…high maintenance at the moment.”

Joanna looked slightly more sympathetic. “Bad breakup?”

“Bad resurrection.” Willow picked up her purse. “He think we’re hallucinations and he’s still pre-brain death, you know how it is when you pull someone back from the dead. There are always complications.” She handed a postcard with her current address to Rosemary and hers and Giles’ cellphone numbers. “If any of you think of anything that might be useful or see anyone who looks suspicious, please give me a call.”

She walked out into the daylight, feeling that the chances of Alicia having been murdered by some random psychopath had just receded considerably. If Karin Preston had been correct, there was something dark and powerful stirring in Harrogate, and something that knew enough to hide itself from ordinary incantations. She took out her phone and was calling Giles even as she walked to the bus stop. 

***

Giles walked back into Alicia’s flat to find Gunn wielding a vacuum cleaner against the ugly patterned carpet in the sitting room while Wesley obliviously made notes at Alicia’s little table. The doors to the two bedrooms were open and he could see that the windows had been opened, letting in dust and traffic noise and a profusion of sunlight and also letting out the last scents of Alicia, giving him a sharp pang of loss. He noticed that the camp bed had been made up in the boxroom and the sheets and duvet cover changed on the double bed in the main bedroom. A neat pile of duvet, sheets and pillowcase lay stacked in readiness next to the sofabed. The air smelt of the lemon-scented jaycloths with which Gunn had evidently been wiping everything that wasn’t actually moving.

“I see you’ve been busy.”

Gunn switched off the vacuum cleaner. “Just trying to make the place…you know...” 

The words ‘less like a shrine’ remained unspoken. Giles raised an eyebrow. “I’m sure you’ll make someone a wonderful little wife some day.”

Wesley sniggered but when Gunn turned to glare at him, Wesley pretended to be checking a cross-reference. Gunn pushed the vacuum cleaner back into cupboard in which Giles noticed an ironing board had also been jammed. Gunn asked: “Did you find out anything?”

“I visited some of Alicia’s friends, and apparently her boyfriends were all pot-smoking layabouts who fancy themselves as future rockstars but whose only real talent was an ability to look good when naked. What is the matter with young women today?”

Gunn switched on the kettle. “Yeah, cause her mother was so selective in her choices. Weren’t you like black magic dabbling crazy rock guitarist guy yourself back in the day?” He held up his hands. “And for all I know you had the whole ‘looking good naked’ thing going for you, too, but I don’t want to know. Tea?”

“I’ll have you know I was…” Giles broke off as honesty derailed his indignation. “Exactly as you described. And yes, I’d love a cup. Wesley?” He noticed there was still a macaroon left on the plate that Jean had brought up earlier and snagged it before turning to the other Englishman. “Tea?”

Wesley took an unfathomably long time to look up from his book, look at Giles, look at Gunn, take in the arcane significance of the kettle and then say: “Yes, please.”

“What is he waiting for?” Giles demanded of Gunn as he followed him into the galley kitchen so beloved of bad seventies house conversions. “I keep feeling as if there’s a secret password we’re supposed to be giving him to confirm our identities. Should we start wearing name tags?” He noted that Gunn was using the last of the milk in one of the Devonware jugs that had accompanied the sandwiches and made a mental note to pick up a fresh carton when he went out next. It felt like a very long time since they had eaten those sandwiches. His stomach seemed to agree with him as it rumbled a complaint.

“You just need to give him time,” Gunn sighed, handing over a cup of tea that was surprisingly exactly the way Giles liked it. Giles took another sip and had it confirmed. Eight years he had tried to train Buffy and Xander to make a drinkable cup of tea without success and in the interim Wesley had apparently managed to teach Gunn perfectly. That was rather galling.

Gunn took Wesley his tea, putting it down on the table by his elbow. “Tea, Wes. Don’t spill it.”

Wesley looked up at Gunn for a long surprised moment and then blinked. “Thank you.”

Gunn sighed and patted him on the shoulder. “You’re welcome.” 

Willow burst in through the door in a blaze of red hair and dangling tapestry handbag, clearly out of breath from running. “Giles, you need to switch on your cellphone!” 

Giles guiltily checked his coat, snatching up the annoyingly fiddly little Nokia that Dawn had persuaded him to buy to discover that it was indeed switched off. “Damn. Sorry.”

Wesley murmured: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…” without looking up from his reference books.

“Yes, that’s quite enough from you, Wesley.” Giles glanced at Gunn. “I swear he’s winding us up half the time with the whole crazy thing.” When he turned to Willow it was to find her with her hands on her hips, tapping her foot impatiently. “And I gather you spent your time rather more fruitfully than I did.”

“We need to do a revealing spell,” she said breathlessly, grabbing Giles’s hand and beginning to tug him towards the couch. “We need to do it right now.”

“Mister Giles…” 

Giles turned to find Judith Philips smiling at him from the open doorway. “There’s afternoon tea if you’re hungry. We’re reserving a table for you while you’re here so you can come down any time you want and have a bit of something.”

Giles could feel his stomach rumbling again but Willow had seemed so eager to do the spell at once. He turned to her. “Willow, would you mind…?”

But she was already gazing at Judith Philips wistfully. “Afternoon tea? Like little scones and strawberry jam and cream and cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off?”

Judith beamed at her benevolently, apparently making the usual mistake of assuming that Willow was a decade younger than her actual age. “If you want, my dear. Table Seven. Alicia always liked that one best.”

Willow let go of Giles’s arm. “Let’s do the spell later. Wesley probably needs some tea.” She went over to where Wesley was working and took his hand. “Come on, Wesley, it’s time you had some scones and jam and things.” To Giles’s astonishment, Wesley looked only slightly perplexed by being pulled to his feet and towards the stairs by a determined redhead, going with Willow with so little resistance that Giles could only presume that Cordelia had trained him so rigorously to obey women without argument that it had lodged too deep even to be dislodged by general psychosis.

Over her shoulder, Willow called: “I’ll tell you what I learned while we’re eating.”

Giles exchanged a glance of resignation with Gunn who shrugged and said in a rather too perfect mimicking of Wesley’s accent: “Afternoon tea, it is then.”

 

The teashop clientele had thinned out a little but the room was still more than half full. There was the oddly familiar bustle of middle-aged women carrying trays of cakes and sandwiches and teapots and milk jugs around to the tables, greeting regulars with cheery enquiries after children and grand-children. The room felt longer and narrower than earlier, the light suddenly inadequate with each table now clustered with customers. The noise level was an acceptable background murmur but it still felt like a ludicrously public place in which to have a strategy meeting. 

Judith was there in a moment to take their orders. Giles opted for the broccoli and stilton soup leftover from lunchtime and quickly reheated for him in the microwave, while Willow encouraged Wesley and Gunn to eat the cream teas she had already ordered for them. She was entirely delighted by the two plates of sandwiches, the wholemeal salmon and transparently thin and crustless white cucumber selection, and seemed to think that a scone with jam and cream on it was the apex of epicurean delight. Gunn took one bite out of his cucumber sandwich before looking at it in disbelief. “Where’s the food value?”

Willow hushed him and pushed him the plate of salmon sandwiches instead. “Try one of these.”

Gunn lowered his voice to hiss intently: “I’m serious, I can’t mix it up with scaly demons on this pansy-assed British food. No wonder everyone around here is five feet nothing and couldn’t pick up an axe with a fork-lift. They don’t do burgers or hot dogs?”

“It’s afternoon tea,” Willow insisted. “It’s not a proper meal. Now eat your scone and look as if you like it.”

Giles nodded his appreciation as the waitress went past and Gunn pulled out another smile as well, Willow also beamed while Wesley ignored all of them and continued to write on his napkin with the pen he had still been holding when Willow grabbed him.

“So…” Gunn leaned back in his chair, which promptly rocked alarmingly, Giles having to grab his arm quickly to pull him back – although not before he had joggled the elbow of a woman sitting at the table behind them. Gunn had to break off and apologize, using more boyish charm that made the woman forgive him pretty much everything as far as Giles could see, and the woman’s balding fiftyish husband scowl horribly. Gunn turned back. “So – this whole Preston thing, what’s that about?”

As Willow had a mouth full of scone, Giles answered for her: “Jennet Preston was one of the Witches of Pendle – probably the most famous witches in English legal history. They were believed to have been responsible for the deaths by witchcraft of seventeen people all based in and around the Forest of Pendle.”

“There were thirteen of them,” Willow added. “Eleven of them were hanged: Jane and John Bulcock, Isobel Robey, Katherine Hewitt, Anne Redferne, Anne Whittle – ”

“Alias Chattox,” Giles put in.

“Alice Nutter, Alizon, Elizabeth and James Device and Jennet Pendleton.”

“Elizabeth Southerns, alias Demdike, died in prison awaiting trial and Margaret Pearson was found guilty of witchcraft but not murder and received a sentence of one year’s imprisonment.”

“According to the Wicca group that Alicia was attending, two of their members – Dora and Karin Pendleton, who were grandmother and granddaughter, were descendents of Jennet Pendleton, and had actual magical abilities. Well, the Wicca group don’t think that because they don’t believe in magic, but Alicia thought that Dora and Karin did.”

“And this Karin Pendleton must have thought Alicia did because she asked her to come over and help her with this revealing spell, right?” Gunn looked between Willow and Giles for confirmation.

Giles nodded. “Alicia definitely had some magical abilities. She wasn’t powerful, but there was a latent spark there. She was perfectly capable of performing simple spells.”

“So, I’m thinking the spell revealed something,” Willow said in between mouthfuls of scone. “And that’s why they were killed. They were killed because they were witches but not because the person who killed them didn’t like witches, just because witches were the only people who could find out what they were up to. I think the whole Bible quote thing was just to throw the police off the scent. I think Karin Pendleton may have been gay too, from something one of the wicca women said. So, the police might waste a lot of time chasing that as a reason.”

Gunn took another bite of his scone, clearly thinking this food was ridiculously finicky for the energy value it didn’t contain. “So, before you make with the hocus pocus don’t you think you should go and take a look at what the other two witches were doing?”

“First thing tomorrow,” Willow said. “But tonight Giles and I need to do a revealing spell to see if we can detect any demon activity in the area. That was one of the first spells I did with…” She broke off and Giles patted her shoulder gently. “Anyway, it should help narrow things down.”

Wesley looked up from his napkin. “I doubt it. The Yorkshire moors have always had a higher than average number of demonic denizens. So do Exmoor and Dartmoor, and, for obvious reasons, Wales.”

“Are we talking vampires here, Wes?” Gunn demanded.

Wesley shook his head. “Moors are too open for vampires, which are, after all, human in memory and on their reliance upon creature comforts. They prefer to mingle with mankind and enjoy all mod-cons wherever possible. What lives on the Yorkshire moors would inevitably be far more primitive and bestial than vampires.”

“Less inclined to watch ‘Passions’ too,” Giles pointed out.

“So, what spell would you suggest, Wesley?” Willow asked in an encouraging voice.

He went back to his napkin. “A spell to reveal magical activity rather than demonic biology.” 

Giles craned his neck to see what Wesley had written on his napkin. There was a neat list.

Invocation of Evil Spirits – check against Lemegeton & Robert Turner  
Raising of the Dead from Hell – despite contradictory references in Grimorium Spirituum we know empirically that this ritual demands living vampires, not the blood of witches  
Negotia perambulantia in tenebris – planets in ascendancy for the summoning of Gamiel or Narcoriel? Check astronomical records.  
Talismans of the Sage of the Pyramids? Which rituals use blood?  
Talisman of Arbatel – double check against Theosophia Pneumatica  
The seeking after lost objects of power? Grimroire of Honorius?

Giles sat back and evidently revealed his irritation as Gunn immediately leaned forward. “What?”

“I would love to know how the man who can barely comprehend an offer of a cup of tea has apparently every single one of his faculties in place when it comes to research?”

Gunn shrugged. “’Cause research is what Wes does for fun. And the crazier everything else gets, the more he gets into the research. It’s just his way.”

“He has a point about the magical activity,” Willow offered a little apologetically.

“I’m not denying it,” Giles acknowledged. “But I’d like to know about the demon species in the area anyway. It’s best to be…”

“More tea, Mr. Giles?”

Giles looked up to find Judith Philips hovering with the teapot poised to pour. “Thank you, Judith, a top up would be most welcome.”

She gave everyone a refill, including Wesley, who for reasons known only to himself, chose to look up, gaze at her intently, and then say: “Thank you.” 

Judith seemed semi-mesmerized although Giles couldn’t tell if it was by some attraction Wesley possessed of which he was unaware or by the rather spectacular shadows under the man’s eyes. “Have you been ill, dear?” she asked him.

“Dead, actually,” Wesley explained.

Giles gripped his arm, quite hard. “He was in a coma. He’s still a little…disorientated.” He gave Wesley what he hoped was a quelling glare. “He’s recuperating.”

“I’ll get you some more sandwiches,” Judith told Wesley kindly. “You still look a little peaky.”

Giles waited until she was out of earshot before hissing at Wesley: “Stop telling people you were dead.”

Wesley seemed surprised by his irritation. “I was.”

“And you were a bloody idiot the whole time you were in Sunnydale, but I wasn’t planning on telling anyone about that either. If you can’t say anything sane then just…sit there quietly.”

“Hey, back off,” Gunn protested. “He can’t help being confused.” 

“I think he probably could if he actually wanted to.”

Willow gave him a reproachful look. “Giles… Wesley isn’t doing it on purpose.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that. I think he’s still on a mission from the Watchers’ Council to get me up on a murder charge.”

“Weren’t they blown up in this reality?” Wesley picked up his refilled teacup and sipped it with obvious pleasure.

“Wesley this is our reality,” Giles told him through gritted teeth.

“It really is,” Willow grimaced. “You went to…a dead place, and then you came back. You didn’t go anywhere else.”

Wesley took another sip of his tea. “Angel’s on a mission for the Powers. I think he may have to cross several dimensions.”

Gunn sighed. “Yeah, right, man. Angel’s still the chosen champion of the Powers, and is off there right now doing the heroic thing and is going to Shanshu any day now and live happily ever after in a domestic bliss threeway with Cordy and Buffy that only gets interrupted by the visits from the grandkids Connor gives him.”

Wesley gazed at Gunn unblinkingly. “You don’t believe him?”

Gunn put a hand up to his head. “I don’t think you’re seeing what you think you’re seeing. I think you have all these things in your head you never got a chance to resolve and now they’re paying social calls.” Wesley dropped his gaze and began to doodle on the napkin, but he was gripping the pen so hard Giles was concerned that it might break. Gunn grimaced. “Wes, I’m not saying your opinion doesn’t count. I’m not even saying you’re wrong. I’m just saying that the world you came back to is the same one you left, and in this world we don’t know what happened to Angel or Spike or Illyria. All we know is that they’re gone.”

Wesley stopped doodling and there was a moment of terrible stillness. “No, I saw him. He spoke to me. He told me where he was and where he was going.”

“And did he say anything to you that wasn’t exactly what you wanted to hear?” Giles demanded. Too late he saw Gunn waving to him to be quiet and had to grimace an apology.

“Or maybe you did see him,” Gunn said quickly. “Hell, you were always closer to him than I was and he’d know how you’d be worried. He’d want to set your mind at rest. We all saw Cordy, right? She was as real as you are and according to the records she never even left the hospital.”

“Well, yes,” Giles coughed hastily, trying to find some conviction in his tone. “‘More things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio’, and all that…”

Willow said: “So, Wesley – what spell do you think we should use to check for magical activities? I was thinking maybe a conjuration to reveal evil intent? What do you think?”

Wesley gazed into space for a long moment and Willow repeated her question with an artificial brightness that had an edge of desperation to it. As he still didn’t answer she added: “Cause I was thinking maybe the one from The Black Grimoire rather than the one from the old Grimorium Verum because I don’t actually have the windpipe of a stag in my luggage. And I know you might say – who goes anywhere without the windpipe of a stag, but I thought benzoin and storax would probably do as well. Wouldn’t you?”

Wesley picked up the napkin on which he’d been writing, said: “I have to do some more research,” and headed in the direction of the stairs.

As Gunn rose to go after him, Giles caught his arm. “Gunn, I really think you need to let him start to do things by himself. I know it’s hard. I know it’s not easy seeing him like this, but he is a grown man, and at least some of his faculties are still in place. I really think the best thing to do is finish your sandwiches and then return to the flat at a more leisurely…”

“I left the windows open.”

Giles rose to his feet as well. “Probably best to get on with that invocation in any case.”

Willow had already sprung up. “I’ll just go and make a start on that.” She darted past a surprised Judith Philips with an apologetic wince as she headed after Wesley. 

“Could we take those with us?” Giles asked, taking the plate of sandwiches from her.

“Of course.” She looked after Wesley in bemusement. “Is he feeling ill?”

“He’s fine. Just a little…” Giles tried to think of one word that encapsulated everything that Wesley was right now.

“Tired,” Gunn put in. 

Giles nodded. “Absolutely. He’s very, very tired. Thank you for a lovely tea.”

“Yes, lovely,” Gunn added, before taking the stairs two at a time after Wesley.

Giles sighed and took a moment to catch his breath as he thought of Alicia walking up these stairs, worse, of her coming down them for the last time; probably all lit up with excitement because a real witch had asked for her help. As he began to trudge up the stairs after Gunn, it occurred to him that although Alicia’s powers had been weak, if these two other women had indeed come from a long line of witches then their combined power should have been considerable. Which meant that whoever their murderer had been, he or she was clearly an extremely dangerous adversary.

***

Willow sat cross-legged in front of the map of Yorkshire and took a steadying breath. The crystals looked incongruous on those meticulously drawn railways and rivers, those red arterial roads and curving contour lines, but Giles had said they needed Thespia to be exact. They had already emptied their pockets of all alloyed metal, Willow removing her necklace and placing it to one side in case the silver and copper it contained affected the spell. She could still hear the sounds of traffic faintly, and when people walked down the sidewalk just under the open window to her bedroom she could hear their conversation. She felt there should be hushed expectancy as they walked past the building in which a girl had lived who had been murdered, some reference to Alicia, but they were talking about their plans for the evening; one of them mentioning a boy she hoped would be in the ‘pub’ that night.

Giles was the one who went into each bedroom in turn and closed the windows, pulled across the drapes, then came out, shutting the doors firmly. It felt as if they were in the womb of the house now, a room’s width from the street; the kitchen and bathroom with their small windows looking out onto the back yard and, in the middle, this warm protected space. 

The turning of the page of a book seemed disproportionately loud and Giles sent a glare in Wesley’s direction, but the man was oblivious, still working at that little pine table. 

“Wesley, would you like to join us?” Giles suggested in his best parade voice.

Wesley didn’t even look up. “No, thank you.”

Willow wondered if Giles was ever going to get used to the fact that Wesley wasn’t Xander and had not been a teenager when Giles first met him. Wesley had done the equivalent of Giles’ job for four and a half years in Los Angeles; he was presumably past the point where he would do what he was told just because a male authority figure was the one doing the telling.

Gunn said, “Man, leave him alone while he’s quiet.” Gunn was interested in seeing the ‘hocus pocus’ as he called it. Willow found that she already felt comforted by having him around, sitting opposite her, cross-legged, all boyishly handsome and intrigued by what was going to happen next. 

Willow gave Giles a ‘please don’t be mad’ look. “Given that he seems to think we’re all hallucinations, he’s really very polite to us.”

Giles took what seemed to be a deep, steadying breath of his own. “Let’s just get on with it.”

Willow gazed at the map, nodded to Giles, picked up the powder in its little pewter dish and then froze. Her mouth was dry as sawdust as she saw a man with his skin torn off, felt the rush of something dark and terrible and pitiless spring from her mouth with a stench like putrefaction; felt the rush of it through her veins, power, the exultation of it, an untamed thing wanting to be set loose. She put down the dish and breathed in and out, deep even rhythms just as they had taught her at the coven. Then she looked at Gunn and realized what the problem was.

“I need to talk about what I did.”

Giles put down his dish of powder wearily. “Willow, this isn’t an AA meeting.”

“But I need Gunn to know. If he’s working with us – if he’s living with us – if this is what we are now – the four of us, I don’t think we should be having secrets from them.”

“I’m sure they already know.”

“Wesley didn’t until I told him.” She turned to Gunn. “Did you know that I flayed a man alive and tried to destroy the world?”

Gunn blinked. “Uh – no, I guess that never came up.”

“I lost control. I was grieving and all I cared about was getting revenge, and I did terrible things, and I hurt Giles, and I tried to destroy the world, but Xander stopped me.”

That seemed to intrigue the man more than the flaying tale had shocked him. “How?”

“With references to yellow crayons,” Giles sighed. “A story I have heard, I must confess, rather too many times. I don’t think Gunn needs to know all the gory details, Willow.”

“I think I need to tell him.” She started to tell it, how it felt to be in the grip of a grief so consuming it hollowed you out, until there was nothing of you left, there was just the grief and the rage that this could have been allowed to happen; that there could only be this empty space left where your life had been and the power that had filled that emptiness, seeping into every pore. 

She was less than halfway through before Gunn held up a hand. “Giles is right. I don’t need to know.”

“But I…”

“Betrayed your friends? Hurt the people who love you? Lost sight of right and wrong? Willow, we’ve all been there.”

“But I want you to…”

“Fred’s dead because of me. Connor grew up in a hell dimension because of Wesley. Cordelia let herself get demonised and then damned near killed us all. Angel let warlocks who worked for the most evil firm in the world mess with our memories to protect his son. And we were the good guys. You think you guys had the patent on screwing up down in Sunnydale? We did our fair share in LA, and then we did the fair share of about twenty-five other people and their families. Good people fuckin’ up sometimes – not exactly newsflash material to me.”

Willow sighed and held up the little bowl of powder. “I just need you to know that every time I cast a spell I walk a tightrope and I could fall off at any time, and if I did I could hurt you very, very badly.”

Gunn just returned her gaze steadily, eyes warm and kind. “So don’t fall off.”

She managed a smile. “If you were a woman I might have to marry you. Of course, I probably know a spell that could fix that you not being a woman thing…”

“What makes you think, if I was a woman, you’d be my type?”

Willow felt a healthy bolt of indignation. “Oh, I am so your type!”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong. ’Cause although I may be susceptible to a pretty girl with brains, I have never dated a redhead in my life.” 

“I don’t believe you.”

“No, it’s true. Because they’re Satan’s handmaidens and I ain’t going there.”

“I am not Satan’s handmaiden! If I was going all hellboundy I wouldn’t be working as a ‘handmaiden’ I’d be running a circle of Hell all by myself, with punishments that would make your hair stand on end apart from the little detail of you not having any. And I’ll have you know that redheads are very passionate and loyal. Also, good at math.”

Gunn gave her the kind of smile that would have had her dropping her books on the floor in a fluster a few short years earlier. He shrugged, conceding defeat. “Okay, the math thing just turned me right around – because what man won’t give it up for a calculus nerd?”

“I’m just glad that you recognize the power of the vectors, and hey – algebra.”

“Can we please get on with the spell?” Giles demanded.

Willow rolled her eyes. “It’s customary to exchange banter before moments of high tension. It calms the nerves.”

“Well, during the interminable wait for the two of you to finish exchanging inanities, mine are getting frayed.” Giles picked up the powder and nodded to Willow.

“So, how does this work?” Gunn leaned forward with interest.

“We call on the goddess Thespia to show us where the demons are hanging out and she lights them up for us like Christmas Eve, and then we tell her how great she is.”

“Sweet.”

“It’s a mutually beneficial contract where we get information and she gets to feel all warm and fuzzy inside.”

“Hey, I remember how it is with goddesses – they never get enough of that love and praise thing.”

Giles raised his bowl of powder and glared at Willow, who quickly followed suit. She concentrated as they poured the powder onto her hand, seeing Tara in her mind’s eye, glowing by the candlelight that seemed to reveal her full beauty in a way that the brassy brightness of sunlight never could; the flame turning the edges of her fair hair to beaten gold… Seeing the look of pain on Giles’s face, she wondered if this was a spell he had done with Alicia; if in Willow’s place right now he was seeing the girl with the fair hair and the embroidered sweater. Willow met his gaze and for a moment she felt it pass between them, a tangible grief, a sombre power added to the mix.

Giles poured the powdered malachite and vervain onto his hand as Willow poured the powdered celestine and ground Bishop’s weed onto her open palm, feeling it tingle, the sting of the spiteful weed reacting against the focusing energy of the crystals. She closed her eyes.

Giles intoned quietly: “Thespia, we walk in shadow, walk in blindness. You are the protector of the night” and behind his voice she could hear Tara saying the same words, when everything had been so bright and new and perfect between them; when the love they were already feeling had barely revealed itself in more than a feeling of excitement at getting to spend another evening with her new friend, a sense of connection unlike anything she had ever known before.

A tear welled up in her eye and trickled down her face in a slow salt sting as she said her half of the spell: “Thespia, goddess, ruler of all darkness, we implore you, open a window to the world of the underbeing.” She opened her eyes and it was Giles in front of her, watching her steadily as they both blew their powder onto the map. There was such understanding and compassion in his green eyes that although they were sitting cross-legged across the opposite sides of a Landranger map, she felt as if he had just cut off a piece of his strength and given it to her. She blinked away the tears and tried to concentrate on the swirl of multi-coloured mist in front of them. There was a lot of it, and as it concentrated into floating dots of colour she realized that they had certainly not left demonic energy behind in Sunnydale; in fact there seemed to be a lot of it in all of Yorkshire in all kinds of species.

She and Giles exchanged a weary look of recognition. “Whoopee,” Willow sighed.

 

The Spell for Detecting the Acts of Dark Sorcery that Giles found in one of his old books had turned out to be a bust. Willow had said the incantation and thrown the powdered sage over the area around the cave where the girls had been killed and there had been not even a glimmer of sorcery. She sat back in disappointment.

“Maybe I overshot. This spell is for detecting really powerful magic. Maybe the people who killed Alicia aren’t that powerful. Maybe they’re just…”

“Incompetent misfits trying to get some attention?” Giles glanced across at her. “We both know how dangerous even that can be.”

“A man with a knife is generally going to be stronger than a woman, unless she’s a Slayer,” Willow sighed.

“Or a witch,” Gunn put in. “If the guys who took the two from the bookshop didn’t have any real magic whammo then shouldn’t those witch descendent women have been able to take them?”

“Maybe they weren’t that powerful, after all.” Willow turned through the spellbook for anything else that might help them. “Or maybe they had the potential to be powerful but they hadn’t had the right training.”

Giles shook his head. “But they were clearly from a background of comprehending witchcraft. It seems unlikely that they wouldn’t have known how to train themselves to improve if they actually possessed any power. Perhaps they simply maintained a fiction of having real abilities.” He glanced over at the table where Wesley was working. “Wesley, what do you think?”

There was the usual long pause before Wesley looked up and focused on them. “If they’re killing witches for their blood but don’t have ability enough to know if a witch has power herself then they’re not truly dangerous. If they have power enough to overcome witches of real power and hide themselves from your detection, then they’re more powerful than we are.” He looked back at his books, adding almost conversationally: “Either way, more witches are probably going to die.”

Giles sighed. “I think it’s inevitable.”

Willow gazed at him in horror. “That more witches are going to die?”

Giles wiped the last of the revealing powder from his hands. “That I’m definitely going to have to hit Wesley at some point.”

***

One moment Gunn was asleep and dreaming of the cellar again; dreaming of a demon cutting out his heart every day before sending him back to the brightness of that artificial family whom he thought he loved and who loved him but who sent him down the cellar to have his heart cut out by a demon who sent him back to the brightness… Then he was awake. 

Just for a moment of disorientation, he thought he was in his bedroom in the Hyperion, that the place in the bed beside him was warm but empty because Fred had gone in search of an after-sex snack and that any minute now he’d hear Connor start wailing for his three a.m. feed – Then he remembered all that was gone now; that every family he had ever known had been taken away from him by vampires, and the only thing he had now was –

“Wes!” Gunn sat bolt upright in the bed, heart hammering as he realized the bedroom door was open and the bedroom window was open, and there was no sign of Wesley. 

He was already wearing his boxers, but pulled on a pair of sweat pants at the run, going straight to the bathroom and hoping the door was closed with the light showing underneath, but, no, damnit, it was dark and open and empty – and talking of empty so was the front door that led down to the tearoom.

Giles half-stirred on the sofa bed, blinking in the confusion of the near-sighted and semi-conscious. “Is something wrong?”

“No, it’s okay. Just go back to sleep.” He didn’t want Giles getting angry with Wesley and he knew how close the man was to blowing a fuse. He hurried down the stairs, feeling the draught as he touched bottom, pushing open the door into the tea shop and blundering forwards, hitting his hip on the edge of a table, knocking over a chair; swearing as he set it upright again, stubbing his toe on a table leg before he had made it to the open door, swung wide and letting in the night air. “Wes? Wesley?”

He stumbled out onto the sidewalk, hurting his bare feet on the paving and there was Wesley in his pyjamas, just stepping out from between two parked cars despite the cab hurtling down the street, two burning eyes out of darkness, and as capable of dealing out death as any demon from a hell dimension. Gunn grabbed him and hauled him back, not caring how roughly he did it, just wanting to get him out of the way of those beams of killing light. Through the blare and swerve of the taxi driver’s annoyance, he found himself shaking him. “Wesley, what the hell are you doing?”

Wesley looked even more haggard in the neon lighting, and although Gunn’s fist bunched in his pyjama jacket was arresting his motion, his attention was still focused on the other side of the street. He focused on Gunn with difficulty. “I saw Angel.” He went to step off the kerb again and Gunn yanked him back.

“Damnit, Wes, he’s gone, okay? Angel’s gone! He ain’t anywhere on this earth and he sure as hell ain’t where we are any more!”

Wesley tried to pull loose. “I saw him from the window. He was going down there. I have to follow him.” 

Gunn saw the narrow sidestreet leading off their own, barely an alley, a house width between towering walls, no street light, just the neon reflection of their own lamp in a puddle ten feet into the darkness. It looked like the kind of place where a vampire would wait for prey. It certainly wasn’t the kind of place he wanted anyone he knew wandering down at night, barefoot and unarmed.

“He wasn’t there, Wes!” Still keeping his fingers bunched in the man’s pyjama jacket, he yanked him roughly back into the tearoom, slamming the door behind them and shooting all the bolts across that Wesley had no business pulling back in the first place. “You can’t just go wandering off by yourself in the middle of the night, do you understand?”

Ironically, Wesley looked like Wesley again; a sleep-deprived, exhausted, back-from-the-dead Wesley but animated with intent now, like the old version who got hyped up on his research and believed in what they were doing; there was a new focus in his eyes, as if they’d just been handed a case and he’d found the way to solve it. “I have to find him.”

He slammed him back against the door he had just bolted, not knowing where this anger had come from just knowing it was a white light in his head, a red mist in front of his eyes. “He’s gone! He’s gone and he isn’t ever coming back! None of them are! All that’s left now is you and me, and if you play in the damned traffic there’s just me. Now, am I going to have to tie you to the bed? Because I will. Don’t think I won’t.”

“Gunn…”

He wheeled around in anger at that quiet voice behind him, and found Giles wearing the same brand of striped pyjamas he’d bought Wesley, and Willow in her much less striped pyjamas still at the foot of the stairs, rubbing her eyes sleepily.

“He was out in the street!” Gunn yelled at Giles as if it were his fault.

Giles just kept looking at him. “So I gathered. But you’re going to hurt him.”

Gunn became aware of how tightly he was gripping Wesley’s arms, how hard he had slammed him back against the door. He let him go as if he burned his fingertips. “Oh God, Wes, I’m sorry.”

Wesley was looking at Gunn as if he’d never seen him before in his life. “I just want to find Angel.”

“He’s gone.” Gunn ran a hand over the comforting warmth of his own shaven head, wondering if he could feel his brain throbbing with fear and frustration through his bone and skin. “They’re all gone.”

Giles stepped forward. “Wesley, you need to go back to bed. We can discuss what you saw in the morning, but for the moment you need your sleep, and, frankly, so do I. Now, please do as Gunn tells you.”

Gunn reached out and took Wesley’s bony wrist in his hand and gave him a gentle tug in the direction of the stairs; a little to his surprise, Wesley came with him, but when he looked around the darkened tearoom he didn’t seem to recognize anything. Wesley’s eyes widened. “Gunn?”

“Yes?”

“Did you see Angel too?”

Gunn realized belatedly that he was exhausted, bone deep, marrow deep, nerve deep tired and that his wound was aching, a rhythm throb of pain. “No, Wesley. I didn’t see him.” He could feel his muscles hurting with too much inactivity. He’d been cooped up for so many days now, in the hospital, in the coven, and now kept under house arrest by Wesley’s mental instability. No wonder he was starting to go crazy too. 

He led Wesley back up the stairs, just stepping around Willow because he didn’t even know how to deal with anyone else right. He didn’t know how to deal with Wesley, and he didn’t have a choice about that. His fingers wanted to tighten on Wesley’s wrist until they left a bruise, some proof that he existed, that he had left an imprint on Wesley. He made himself keep his grip firm but not cruel, no tightening his fingers until Wesley was in too much pain not to comprehend that he was right here, right now, even if he had to hurt him to make him notice…because he didn’t want to be that guy, not even tonight.

At least Wesley wasn’t struggling, although the first thing Gunn did when he got him back into their room – after firmly shutting the door before Giles and Willow decided this was a party to which everyone was invited – was shove him onto the bed and then hurry over to shut the window and pull across the white-painted catch. He turned around and there was Wesley sitting on that coverlet looking up at him like he was so damned…lost. That stopped every word that had been on his lips, Wesley gazing up at him like that, desperately needing Gunn to give him a world that wasn’t spinning out of control. As if Wesley’s sanity was something one of them should have remembered to keep in a jar for occasions just like this.

“I saw him.”

Gunn thought about just closing his eyes and going to sleep for a thousand years. He could play Sleeping Beauty for a change. He was sick of having to be Prince Charming. He didn’t want to fight any more dragons or cut his way through any forests of flesh-tearing thorns. He didn’t even want to be woken up with a kiss. They could just let him rest.

“I believe you think you saw him, Wes. I just don’t think he was there.”

It was a shock to realize that Wesley had tears in his eyes, those haunted grey-blue eyes of his, the ones that could be cold as death sometimes but right now were just too full of pain for Gunn to bear. He sank down on the bed next to him and took his hand. “I’m here. Can’t that be enough for now? Can’t it just be enough that you and I aren’t dead?”

“How do I know you’re not dead? How do I even know that I’m not? I should be dead. It made sense. It was the last thing in my life that made sense. How do I know any of this is real?” Wesley demanded, and if it hadn’t been so shocking, Gunn would have been relieved to finally hear him express some emotion; except, for the first time in their lives, Wesley was looking to him for the answers and he didn’t have any. He looked so fucking scared and Gunn didn’t know how to help him. Wesley kept looking at him as if Gunn had to have some proof for him, like Gunn should be checking his pockets right now to see if he’d left the incontrovertible evidence of their existence in his other coat. “They talk to me. They touch me. How do I know you’re not one of them?”

Gunn thought of Cordelia, warm and alive in his arms; a life he could feel; breath on his skin, the scent of her; touch and taste and sight and sound; all the senses that told you what was real and what was just a dream. He felt the tears come into his own eyes, not sure if it was because of mourning Cordelia or just that hopeless sense of his own inadequacy. “I guess you don’t.” He slipped his fingers through Wesley’s and tightened his grip. “But I am real and we’re both alive. I just don’t know how to prove it to you.”

“I think it was Angel. I think it was really him. Maybe not tonight. Maybe I was dreaming and I walked to the window and I thought I saw him and he wasn’t here, but before, when he came to me, I think it was him. I think he was real.”

Concerned, Gunn put his other hand to Wesley’s forehead. “Wes, you’re going to get sick if you don’t just…believe in something that’s real. I don’t know how to take care of you. I don’t know how to get you back.”

“If it wasn’t him then everything’s gone.”

Gunn put a hand up to his own head, realizing he had a headache that felt as if it was going to burst every blood vessel in his brain. “When you came to LA, all Angel and Cordelia were to you was people who knew your name. And from that you built a family. Well, that’s what Willow and Giles are. You know they’re good and you know their names and they know who you are. And maybe that’s enough. It was enough before. So, even if Angel and Cordy are gone for good, that doesn’t mean you have to lay down and die too.”

“But I did.” Wesley wearily wiped his eyes. 

“And now you have to get up and keep going, because that’s what we do.” Despite his words, Gunn lay down on the bed and looked up at the ceiling, the world spinning with weariness all around him, as if even the colours had nothing left to give; like it wasn’t even dark because the day was over, just because the sun had run out of fire a long, long time ago. “And I miss them too, and I have to go to sleep now. And I need you to be here when I wake up.” He kept his fingers laced through Wesley’s and pulled his hand in against his heart, wanting to cry like he hadn’t cried since he was a little boy, because his family was gone, and he didn’t have the strength to build another one either, but one of them was going to have to be strong and it looked as if it was going to have to be him. “Please be here when I wake up, Wesley.”

He felt the bed dip as Wesley lay down next to him, and squeezed Gunn’s hand. Gunn opened his eyes and saw Wesley gazing at him in concern. He realized he hadn’t won anything. There was no proof that he could offer that they were alive or that Willow and Giles weren’t just figments of Wesley’s imagination. Wesley just felt sorry for him because he sounded so broken, and Wesley was so lost and alone and confused right now he didn’t have the heart even to be unkind to a hallucination.

##### 4: Knaresborough

Books have led some to learning and others to madness.  
Petrarch

The Black Cat Bookshop was located down a narrow side street off Market Square. Many of the houses seemed to be Victorian but the bookshop looked as if it had been around since Tudor times. It was only two storeys high, unlike its taller neighbours, and with mullioned windows. Giles had expected the place to be locked up – despite the ‘Open’ sign in the window – but when he tried the handle, the door opened at once, an old-fashioned bell clanging noisily.

The interior was dark in that peculiarly comforting way of old bookshops everywhere; wide oak boards slightly warped with age; the grime of ancient nail-heads and the steely glint of newer additions dotting the floor. The place was far larger than he had imagined from outside, almost Tardis-like in the contrast between its modest frontage and these shelves of old books stretching back into what appeared to be infinity. Wide stairs led up to what were presumably the rooms in which Karin and Dora Pendleton had been living. It was considerably darker and dustier and less welcoming than The Magic Box had been, but to Giles it seemed to capture that leather and beeswax scent of a hundred bookshops in which he had spent his youth looking for rare volumes. There was a part of him that always felt a little as if it were coming home when he entered a bookshop but in this one it was an even stronger feeling than usual. There was also that tingle of magical activity; unmistakable after so many years on the Hellmouth. Whoever had situated this building had known what he or she was doing.

A woman with red-rimmed eyes looked up at them from behind the dark wood counter. Behind her was a locked glass-fronted bookcase in which presumably the most valuable books were kept. She had fair hair scraped back into a ponytail and wore a purple embroidered top and some rather ornate silver jewellery. “Can I help you?”

Giles smiled in a way he hoped was reassuring. “I’m Alicia Davidson’s godfather.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” She wiped her eyes. “Did you know Karin and Dora?”

“I’m afraid not. Were you a friend of theirs?”

“I was at school with Karin. I used to help out in the shop when they were busy. That’s why I opened today the same as usual. The police have finished taking fingerprints and I thought Dora would want me to keep the shop open the way I did when they… They used to get…called away sometimes – to help people.” 

He recognized the expression on her face; one he had grown used to in Sunnydale, people in the know wondering if he were one of the wilfully ignorant or could be numbered amongst the dangerously knowing. He nodded. “I understand.”

“Dora…knew things. Before they happened. Like Mother Shipton, you know?”

Giles half-smiled: “‘Carriages without horses shall go/And accidents fill the world with woe/Around the world thoughts shall fly/In the twinkling of an eye…’” He held out a hand. “Rupert Giles.”

She took his hand a little hesitantly. “Beth Greene. Are you a psychic, too?”

“Good Lord, no. Just a researcher. Let me introduce my colleagues…” He managed to introduce Willow and Gunn but Wesley had wandered off to the back of the shop. Giles decided to leave him in peace. “Are you a…practitioner yourself?”

“I dabble a little,” Beth admitted. “But I was never anything like as good as Karin. She and her grandmother were really good.” There was an awkward pause before she said in a rush: “And I know you’re thinking if they were any good – how come they didn’t know what was going to happen to them? And the answer is, I don’t know. They knew so many things. They helped a lot of people. They knew there was something wrong but they couldn’t find it. They were going to try some more spells but then…” She wiped her eyes again.

Willow said: “There are lots of different kinds of witches, and some have lots of psychic powers and can heal and see ghosts and sense good and evil, but they don’t practise active magic. For those kinds of witches it’s difficult to fight off anyone really dangerous, because all their skills are about healing people not hurting them. Were Dora and Karin those kinds of witches?”

Beth looked a little taken aback. “They weren’t all sweet and good and nice if that’s what you’re asking? I mean they were ‘good’. They helped people, and they wouldn’t poison the mice or tread on spiders or anything but they could make books get hot if they weren’t paid for. And they sent that demon to hell that was living in Mrs Fitter’s attic. And when Karin was sixteen and got angry because Lizzie Stark cheated on her with Nancy Collins she made her think her hair was on fire. And I think when she was ten she was the one who made Fleur Polehampton’s knicker elastic snap in the middle of assembly.”

“Okay, she sounds like a normal kind of witch to me.”

Beth looked at Willow curiously. “Are you a witch?”

“Yes,” Willow nodded. “I really am.”

“Are you scared too?”

Giles became aware for the first time that the poor girl behind the counter was practically reverberating with fear. 

“Because I am,” she continued. “Scared. If Karin and Dora couldn’t stop them then I don’t see how anyone can.”

“We may have access to resources that they didn’t,” Giles explained.

Beth pointed at the books in the glass-fronted bookcase behind the counter. “I don’t think so.”

Giles noticed for the first time that in between the other first editions were a number of extremely rare books of magic. “Nevertheless, we’re going to try.”

“This is what we do,” Gunn explained. “And we’re good at it.”

“Sometimes. When we don’t all get killed.” Wesley placed a book on the counter whose cracked brown binding had worn off in several places. A cloud of dust arose from it. 

Giles waved away the dust. “Wesley…”

“I want to buy this book.”

Gunn held out a hand for Giles’ wallet. “Just let him have it. It’s not expensive, is it?”

Beth examined it distastefully. “That’s from that box of books Dora got from that last auction. Some of them were mouldy. You can have it for nothing.”

“I have to pay you for it.” Wesley gazed back at her stolidly. “Otherwise it won’t work.” He placed a battered coin on the counter. It looked Roman and was much blackened with age, but did show faint lines of silver through the grime. “And I have to pay you in silver.”

Looking at the man under the low bulb above the counter, Giles noticed that Wesley’s fingernails could have been cleaner, his fingers were ink-stained, and that the sage-coloured jumper he was wearing seemed to have lost its shape about a decade before. He suspected Gunn had been rather too kind about allowing Wesley to pack his own suitcase. Glancing down to check, he saw that Wesley had managed to round off his whole ‘care in the community’ ensemble with some drab grey trousers that were a good two inches too long for him even with his belt cinched on the last hole, and a pair of very scuffed brown shoes with mis-matched laces.

“You only have to pay with silver for the most sacred grimoires, Wesley,” Giles pointed out. He had a sudden uncomfortable memory of his first meeting with Wesley, the man all spotless and brylcreemed and wearing that Saville Row suit; so neat and shiny and convinced that he was prepared. It was hard to believe that man and this one were even distantly related, let alone the same person.

“I need to pay for this book in silver,” Wesley insisted.

“Just take his money,” Giles told Beth wearily. “Otherwise we’ll be here all day.”

Beth gave Wesley a nervous smile and took the bent coin gingerly, dropping it into the old fashioned cash register as if she were glad to be rid of it. “I have a cousin who’s autistic,” she offered in what was clearly meant to be sympathy.

Giles could practically feel Gunn bristling and put a hand on his arm before he said anything he would regret. “Wesley isn’t…He’s just a little… He lost most of his family in an accident. He’s still having to adjust to a world that they’re not in.”

Beth gazed at Wesley warily and Giles could practically see her wondering if it was the kind of family accident that happened when an obvious lunatic was given access to a chainsaw.

While Wesley found himself a chair and settled down to read his book, Giles asked Beth to tell him everything she could about what Dora and Karin had sensed, but the girl was vague. She could tell him that they had been very concerned, that they had been doing a lot of research into spells of revelation and summoning but not the books they had used. Not that it sounded as if those books had been a great deal of use as, according to Beth, they hadn’t managed to discover what it was that was making them both so uneasy or find a spell that had been successful in revealing it. 

“Can we take a look upstairs?” Giles asked.

Beth grimaced. “I’m not sure. The police have looked at everything already and I don’t think Dora would like strange men in her rooms.”

“What about me?” Willow asked. “Would she have let me look?”

Beth nodded. “She liked other witches. She just wasn’t too sure about men. I mean she’d help them if they needed help but on the whole she thought they were a waste of space. She liked Detective Denison ‘cause he’s kind of…nuts, and they understood each other. She used to help him out with missing kids and things. They respected each other. That’s how I know the police are doing everything they can.”

“I’m sure they are,” Giles reassured her. “But we may be able to explore the possibilities that they can’t.”

While Beth took Willow upstairs, he looked through the glass of the bookcase at the valuable volumes, noting some very rare titles, including the Book of True Black Magic and the Grimorium Verum. Continental reprints going by the look of the binding, but still important books for any practising witch to have. And they did seem to have been practising witches, not just the charm-selling, fortune telling, joss stick-burning diluted remnants of a once powerful clan. This area had always been noted for its links with the supernatural, of course, but Giles could feel a more than ordinary pulse of the mystical mixed in with the dust and shadows. This certainly wasn’t a hellmouth, but so many centuries of magical practice had left an imprint on the land, and this part of the land was particularly sympathetic to magic in the first place. He could imagine that all kinds of creature could be drawn here who were attuned to the wavelengths of magic, forces for both good and evil. 

Turning to Wesley he found the man intently reading his book. Giles looked over his shoulder and saw that half of the text was missing on the page that he was reading; not that Wesley seemed to care. He wondered if he should stop pretending that Wesley was going to get well if they treated him as if he already was, and get him some professional help. Except…what professional help could one get for a man whose trauma had been caused by a fatal stabbing by a demonic warlock and the wrenching of his still raw body and soul back to the earthly plane by a super-powered witch? Who would listen to his story of kidnapped babies carried into a hell dimension, the pain of losing one friend to a mystical coma after her body was hijacked by a higher power and another to possession of her reanimated corpse by the god-king of the primordium and not have him committed? Giles knew that he could be nicer to Wesley than he had been. The man had just always rubbed him up the wrong way and it would have been so much easier for everyone now if he had just been sane. He had lost Jenny without totally unravelling and Buffy had been dragged back from the dead very much against her will, and neither of them had decided that they no longer needed to sleep or wash or connect in any way to the world around them. He also wasn’t sure that Being Nice to Wesley was his job. He rather thought he had enough on his plate trying to solve a murder and keep them all alive and in one piece. 

He wasn’t Angel or Buffy. He didn’t have super powers or immortality at his disposal. He was a forty-seven year old all-too ordinary human being, who had already suffered more concussions in a decade than most people – who weren’t professional boxers – sustained in a lifetime. He was tired and he would have really liked a rest, and instead he had to gear up all over again, go back into battle, and this time, instead of Buffy, and Xander as his companions – a Slayer he loved like a daughter, and a boy who, whatever his intellectual limitations, had certainly always had his heart in the right place – he was having to babysit a vampire-killing gang leader and his crazy ex-colleague – a man he had never liked, and, he suspected, probably never would. 

Nevertheless he touched him briefly on his bony shoulder. “We’re going to visit the scene of the…crime next, Wesley. I don’t suppose there’s anything in that book about Brimham Rocks?”

Wesley didn’t look up. “It has a chapter about how to sanctify a place in preparation for ritual sacrifice.”

Giles snatched his hand away and Gunn said quickly: “He’s just answering the question. He doesn’t mean to…”

“I’m not so sure.” Giles turned away. “He always was a tactless little shit.”

“That ain’t who he is,” Gunn insisted, following him. “And I don’t want you talking about him like that.”

Giles wheeled on him. “I wasn’t the one who almost fractured his skull last night.”

“I was tired and I told him I was sorry. But you need to stop taking it out on him because you’re grieving.”

“You didn’t know him when he was in Sunnydale but you can take it from me that he was a pompous annoying little twerp who would have been greatly improved by smothering. Now, I am happy to protect him and feed him and keep him and put up with him, but don’t expect me to do so with a smile on my lips and a song in my heart.”

“And, according to some people, your Buffy was a self-involved, self-righteous bitch with a God complex, but I don’t see Wes complaining about having had to work with her, maybe because five years happened and that’s not where he is any more.”

“For one thing – don’t ever talk about Buffy like that again in my hearing or you will be picking your teeth up off the floor – for another thing, by ‘some people’ I presume you mean Cordelia, who was, I can assure you, far too self-involved herself – not to mention vain, vacuous and shallow – to have noticed anything about anyone else other than the make of her shoes.”

“Hey, she’s my friend and she’s dead. So shut the fuck up.”

“Can’t I leave you two alone for five minutes?” Willow demanded in dismay.

Giles turned to see Willow at the foot of the stairs looking shocked and Beth with her mouth open. He ran a hand through his hair. “Apparently not.”

There was a long awkward silence in which Gunn went over to where Wesley was sitting and said: “Pick up your book, Wes, we’re going now.” There was an edge to his voice and Giles wondered when they had all started sounding like the world’s most frayed parents in the supermarket checkout queue.

Willow nodded to Beth. “Thanks for your help. We’ll keep in touch, okay…?” The girl looked both surprised and touched when Willow impulsively gave her a hug, and then extremely wistful as they began to leave.

“Yes, thank you.” Giles was painfully aware of Willow giving him a Look, but decided to ignore it for the moment. He felt a pang of loss as they stepped out of the shop, the bell clanging behind them. He would have liked nothing more just now than to spend a quiet hour alone in a bookshop. He met her eye reluctantly. “I know.”

“You said you were going to be more patient.”

“Well, obviously I lied.”

Willow’s eyes were full of hurt and disappointment. “He can’t help being the way he is. He can’t help not being who he was before. When people are like that, you have to take care of them. That’s what you do.”

Giles put his hand on her arm. “Willow, Wesley isn’t Tara. We are going to take care of him and we are going to do everything that we can to…help him and keep him safe but he isn’t a member of our family and we’re not obligated to – ”

“You heard what Gunn said last night,” she lowered her voice to say. “We’re all that they have now. How does that not make them family?”

And then she was striding towards his car with a straight-backed indignation that made him sigh wearily. He missed Buffy; he missed Dawn; sometimes, he actually found himself missing Xander, and perhaps fair exchange was no robbery but he didn’t consider an obstreperous Gunn and a crazy Wesley a good deal. 

They were all waiting for him by the car, Gunn glowering at the world from his ridiculously tall height, Wesley still reading his book, Willow with her arms crossed. Gritting his teeth, Giles said: “We are about to drive to look at the place where my god-daughter was horribly murdered. If anyone is going to be in a filthy mood for this journey, it’s going to be me. If anyone else wants to act out – take a number and get in line.” And then he was getting in the car he had evidently forgotten to lock and slamming the door with a very satisfying bang.

 

Giles wondered why all women were convinced that they could read maps when, in his experience, precisely none of them actually could. “Willow, I can assure you we are meant to be driving towards Ripon not further away from it.”

“Well, it would have made a lot more sense to go to Brimham Rocks from Harrogate, not Knaresborough. And all you have around here are fiddly little roads that don’t even look like roads.”

Giles pulled into the side of the road and took the map from her, examined it for a moment, replayed the last few signposts they’d passed in his mind, and then wearily began to perform what promised to be a six point turn.

“Hope you’re noticing the way we’re not saying a word,” Gunn piped up from the back. “Even though some of us said all along we should go to the rocks first and then the bookshop later.”

Giles finally got the car pointing in the right direction and had his mouth open to say something scathing to Gunn when he noticed Wesley still reading in the back of the car. As if becoming aware of Giles’s eyes upon him, he looked up, and Giles had another view of those awful shadows under his eyes. He wondered if he’d even combed his hair this morning – or week; when was the last time he’d shaved – or washed. Again, he thought of the man he had first met who had been so impeccably dressed and groomed and closed his eyes for a moment. “We need to buy Wesley some clothes.”

Gunn looked at Wesley in surprise. “He’s got clothes. He just picked these this morning.”

“They don’t fit him, Gunn. He doesn’t even have matching laces in his shoes. People are going to think he’s a mental patient.” He sighed. “And he used to care about his appearance.”

“He did?” Gunn took another look at Wesley. “Wes? Do you want to buy some new clothes? Or I could find some of those shirts you used to like? You had that purple one. I definitely packed that.”

“Lilah bought it for me. It was different when I thought she was at peace or I could save her, but I don’t want to wear shirts that still smell of her when she’s in hell.” 

“It’s been over a year since she died. That shirt doesn’t smell of her. Nothing you own still smells of her.”

“I can smell her on it.” Wesley went back to his book. “And I bought the others with money they paid me at Wolfram & Hart. The Senior Partners tried to kill all of us. I don’t want to wear shirts I bought with money from them.”

Gunn tugged at the ill-fitting grey top that looked as if it would be handed out in some third world prison. “That’s why you’re wearing this? Because it’s from before Wolfram & Hart?”

“It’s from before Connor.” Wesley turned a page of the book. “That was why we ended up in Wolfram & Hart. Because of what I did.”

“If we’re talking ancient history then Angel getting naked with Darla is the reason Connor was around in the first place to have fake prophecies made up about him.” As that got no response, Gunn exhaled. “Okay, so how about when we get back we talk about what you will and won’t wear and I give the other stuff away and we get you something new?”

“If I buy you clothes it will be from money paid to me by the Watchers’ Council, Wesley,” Giles added, trying to talk clearly without sounding too much, he hoped, as if he were talking down to the man. “You don’t object to money being spent on you by them, do you?”

“I don’t need any new clothes.” Wesley took the pen from behind his ear and made a note in a notebook he seemed to be keeping in the pocket of his shapeless top.

“Wesley, you look like a wino. If you sat down next to the obligatory nutter on the bus in your present attire, he would undoubtedly move to a different seat.”

Wesley looked up again, almost shocking Giles with the clarity of his reflected blue gaze. “Dressing me differently won’t make me be able to comprehend reality any better. It will just look as if I do. I’m not crazy. I’m just not entirely…sane. I know dead people aren’t supposed to talk to you. I remember everything that ever happened to me, including all the things I’d much rather forget. I know who you all are, I just don’t believe that you’re…”

“Real?” Willow prompted gently.

He nodded and went back to his book. 

“We are real, Wes,” Gunn protested. “You’ve got to get off this whole ‘Carnival of Souls’ thing and believe that we’re real and you’re alive.”

“They all say they’re real, though, including the people you can’t see. They can see each other and see all of you, too. One group of you has to be mistaken and they usually talk more sense.”

Giles took the road to Ripon. “Then why are you helping us? If you don’t think we’re real or that any of this is really happening? Why are you bothering to research who murdered Alicia?”

“Just in case it is real. Because if it is – someone killed three women at least two of which should have been able to fight back. I don’t approve of innocent women being murdered, and I wouldn’t want anything to happen to Willow.” His glance transferred briefly to the young woman in the passenger seat. “She was always very kind.”

Willow undid her seatbelt turned around in her seat. “Wesley, please believe we’re real.”

He looked up at her sadly. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

He didn’t answer and Giles felt another wave of weariness rush over him. “Because he couldn’t take the disappointment if he allowed himself to believe we were real and then it turned out that we weren’t. Well – I think he could probably live with the loss quite well in my case, but not Gunn. He’s already lost too many people to be able to lose Gunn twice.”

Wesley glanced up at him and for a moment his façade of calm removal from them all shimmered like a curtain and Giles saw how appallingly lost he really was. His ‘yes’ was barely audible.

Gunn looked as if someone had slapped him and then reached out and gripped his shoulder. “It’s okay, Wes. You believe it when you’re ready to believe it, okay? We’re all going to be here when you do. You take your time.” He transferred his gaze to Giles. “And I’m sorry about what I said about your friend.”

Giles nodded an acknowledgement. “Thank you. And I apologize for what I said about Cordelia. It was – completely inappropriate. Nor was it in any way a reflection of how I felt when I heard she’d… I was actually rather fond of Cordelia. She was certainly not the most tactful person I’ve ever met, but she was honest and brave and had enormous strength of character and, as with Anya, I miss her considerably more than I ever expected.” He glanced back in the rearview mirror. “If you tell Cordelia that I said that, Wesley, I will kneecap you with a monkey wrench.”

Wesley made a zipping motion across his mouth and Gunn straightened his collar for him as Wesley bent back over his book. When Giles looked back in the mirror as they were – appropriately – driving through Bedlam, he saw that Gunn had pulled out a comb and was endeavouring to do something about the untidy mess sticking up from Wesley’s head that had evidently once been a very expensive haircut.

“Gunn, Wesley’s disorientated, he’s not six,” Willow pointed out.

Giles, who had been pleased to see Gunn taking some responsibility, looked at her in surprise. “He’s only trying to help.”

Willow turned back round in her seat and did up her seatbelt, pulling down the sunshield to keep an eye on Gunn and Wesley in the mirror. “It would just be nice if you two could help Wesley without talking to him as if he came in on the Special Bus.”

Giles exchanged a look with Gunn that was entirely in accord with the other man’s indignation, although Giles couldn’t help noticing that Wesley took that moment to mouth ‘Thank you’ to Willow in the mirror, who responded with an equally clandestine ‘You’re welcome’ back. Giles decided that not only were women hopeless at reading maps, they were also entirely unreasonable.

***

When Giles didn’t complain about the commercialism of areas of outstanding natural beauty and simply paid the car park fee without complaint, Willow knew that he must be as tense as she had feared. There were a few people around, but less, she suspected, than would usually be visiting this place in summer. The murder had evidently cast a pall over even this breath-taking landscape. There was a description from an old guide book:

_These celebrated rocks, one of the wonders of Nidderdale, are situated on a piece of elevated ground, about sixty acres in extent, on the north side of the valley of the Nidd. Placed at an elevation of nine hundred and ninety feet above the level of the sea, and exposed to the fierce action of the elements on every side; these rocks present a most singular appearance at a distance... No description can do justice to them; their grotesque singularity and rugged grandeur alike defy the pen of the poet, and the pencil of the artist. Produced by a violent disruption of nature, when the crust of the earth has been rent asunder, and these heavy masses of millstone grit upheaved and piled around in random confusion, afterwards washed and worn into crevices, and their forms rounded and smoothed by the waves of a sea beating on and around them; the softer parts have yielded to the action of these elements, which the harder have resisted, hence their strange and uncouth forms, which fill all beholders with amazement._

On another day, she was sure she would have felt amazement. But today her overwhelming feelings were of grief for Giles and the women who had died here and something that felt remarkably like…fear. There was a breeze, but that wasn’t what chilled her as she got out of the car. She felt it at once; that ominous sense of something dark and powerful in the vicinity. She had caught a whiff of some of the same sense of power in the bookshop but it had been mixed in with the pulse of magic from the books, and the sense of the building itself and had assumed it was to do with the lingering energy of the two witches themselves. But this was unmistakably a bitter tang of the darkest power. She turned to Giles. “Do you feel it?”

“I have a sense of it.” He turned a slow circle. “This is a place so steeped in history and the supernatural that one might expect a little…atmosphere, but this is so…”

“Dark?” Willow suggested. “Powerful?”

Giles scented the air. “Intangible.”

“I was going for ‘slippery’ myself,” she admitted. 

Gunn rolled his eyes. “Okay, this is getting way too like when Spike and Wesley used to start talking about scotch. So, tell me, is the magic in the air oaky, fruity or smoky and does it have a good peaty finish?”

“More like an odour of brimstone and sulphur with an afterburn of hellfire.” Giles plucked Wesley’s coat out of the back of the car and shook it out. “Put your coat on, Wesley. It’s cold up here.”

“And again with the ‘he’s not six’ thing,” Willow murmured, but low enough for Giles to ignore her if he chose to.

“I mean it’s particularly cold because someone has been practising dark magic and he will be even more susceptible than we are given his current condition.” 

Wesley allowed the man to help him on with his coat before veering away from Giles as quickly as possible to walk next to Gunn, presumably in case the Englishman attempted to make him wear mittens or retie his shoelaces. Willow didn’t think he was that much better off with Gunn, as he immediately straightened the collar of Wesley’s coat and by the way he was frowning over Wesley’s still unkempt-looking hair seemed dangerously close to getting his comb out again.

“Will you just leave him alone?” Willow pleaded. “He has enough to put up with, what with the dead people talking to him, without you two going into motherhen mode. You didn’t see people fussing at Haley Joel Osment, did you?”

Gunn shuddered. “Don’t.”

“What…?”

Wesley looked up. “He’s scared of Haley Joel Osment.”

“I’m not ‘scared’ of him. He just creeps me out – him and that Dakota Fanning. It’s the thought of being alone in a house with them and their unblinking little eyes. If they were my kids I’d make them sleep in the yard.”

“If they were your kids I’d seriously question your wife’s fidelity,” Wesley observed. Giles, Willow and Gunn all looked at him in surprise and he returned their gaze unblinkingly. “What?”

“That was just…almost normal,” Gunn admitted.

“I can go and talk to Illyria if you’d rather…?” Wesley offered, jerking his thumb at a huge pile of rocks that looked eerily like a dancing bear, nearby which Illyria was presumably standing, at least in Wesley’s confused consciousness.

“No, it’s cool.” Gunn caught his elbow and steered him back towards the path. “Just stay close in case these weirdos are still around.”

As they walked along the path, past bracken that rustled a threat as they passed it, as if every frond reverberated with waiting vipers, Willow could sense the dark power even more strongly. And yet it was curiously elusive. When she tried to concentrate on its source, it dissipated, like light dissolving; like a word she had forgotten and would never be able to remember. She tried closing her eyes, reaching out to that power, trying to find its source, and yet she could only sense it, not find it. Opening her eyes in frustration, she saw Giles was also grimacing as he tried to concentrate.

“It doesn’t want to be found,” he observed.

“They must be using some kind of shielding spell.”

“Yes, they can’t prevent us from sensing that there is something dark and dangerous out there, but they’re keeping it hidden.”

“No wonder those witches had their Spider senses tickled. We need to perform a counter-spell.” She patted her purse in which she had all the ingredients in readiness, and a few extra in case they found they needed to perform some revealing spells too.

On another day it would have been so beautiful up here. The incredible rock formations and the green beyond, fields and bracken, and dry stone walling; when the sunlight broke through the clouds it arrowed to the ground in needle-points of light. And yet…behind the old power of a place of mystical convergence there was this new bitterness, as if there was an open grave near at hand, a smell of some otherworldly corruption on the point of breaking through.

As they drew nearer to the place where it had happened, Giles became more and more tense; she could see him steeling himself to endure it. She remembered Buffy dying right in front of them; that terrible feeling of helplessness as they watched her running, knowing she was going to jump, knowing there was no way to stop her or save her; knowing she would die; her broken body lying on the ground like a fallen bird. Giles should never have had to see that. He should never have had to see this either. She felt so sorry for him the tears blurred her vision; making the landscape look rainswept and grey.

It was more of a cleft than a cave, a precarious scramble over green-napped boulders of gritstone and there was the darkness of a crevice between two great shoulders of rock. Willow looked up at Giles and felt her heart turn over, wishing that Wesley would look up now and see this expression on Giles’ face, just look at it and comprehend the enormity of the loss he was feeling, but Wesley was writing in his notebook and didn’t raise his head. Giles hesitated, steeling himself to take another step, and then he climbed over the uneven pile of rocks, and passed out of the sunlight into the blackness where Alicia had died.

Willow knew he wanted to be alone, and let him have a moment, taking the crystals and hyssop and feather from a white cockerel and nails from a horseshoe used to ward off evil spirits, and laying them out on a flat stone. She had read the police report on the death; the Watchers’ Council had been breaking rules for so many years that Giles had never seemed to mind her hacking into the police computers either in Sunnydale or in England. So, she had read all the grisly details, and knew that Giles had too. That had been difficult enough to have to read, but being here, where it had happened, the details were dancing in front of her eyes, the knowledge of who had died first, the way they had died…

She looked around to see if Wesley seemed sane enough today to help her with the incantation, but he was holding a conversation with someone who wasn’t there beside a towering block of eroded gritstone. It seemed to be a quiet and polite conversation, not stressful, but nevertheless there was the whole talking to dead people factor. She heard him say: “…just wondering if you’d heard from Spike? No, I haven’t seen him…” 

Gunn ran a hand over his bald head and sighed, catching Willow’s eyes. She gave him a grimace of sympathy. “I could do that spell…?” she offered. “The separating reality from hallucinations one.”

“Maybe he just needs to see a psychiatrist. Don’t the Watchers’ Council have their own shrinks?”

“It seems like a good idea,” Willow admitted. “But I don’t think they do. A lot of Watchers are all…British, so they probably think they’re supposed to run on stress and suppressed rage.”

“I need to find Lorne.” Gunn sat down on a nearby stone. “I should have looked for him.”

“I don’t think he wanted to be found. I saw some of what happened – pictures in my head of all your last goodbyes when Cordelia or whoever it was sent me off to save you – and Lorne told Angel not to look for him. He told him he wouldn’t find him if he did. I think he really needed to find himself before he could deal with any of the rest of you.”

“Yeah, we tend to have that effect on people.” He looked up at the sky, the rain clouds the colour of lead, the sunlight splintering through in such glorious shafts of gold. “Short of Gwen giving Wesley electrotherapy, I’m out of ideas.”

“I heard she gave you some of that,” Willow admitted innocently.

Gunn coughed. “Yeah, well… maybe a spell might be a better way to go. As long as you’re sure…”

“It won’t hurt him, Gunn, I swear.”

“No, I mean as long as you’re sure we’re actually…real – because if I’m a figment of his imagination I don’t want to know.”

Willow realized she had never fully comprehended just how disorientating an experience it was to be dragged back from the dead, when even being dragged back from the nearly-dead could leave someone as confident as Gunn this uncertain. “You’re real, Gunn, both of you.”

“It’s just… you know when you’re going to die. It doesn’t feel like any other wound you’ve ever had. You’re so cold. It’s like someone took all the blood out of your veins and put ice there instead, and then they filled you full of sand and stuck a hole in you and it’s running out now, and this is it, and there’s no coming back from this. The pain’s not even that much of an issue, because you’re dying, and you’ve never felt like this before because you’ve never been this before; you’ve never been a dead man ‘til now.”

Willow reached out and took his hand. “You’re not a ghost.”

Gunn gazed out at the rocks. “‘Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not here. I did not die.’”

“You really didn’t.”

“We didn’t have a grave for Fred. There was nothing to put in it. Her body was still walking and talking, so we never got a chance to say a real goodbye. And Cordelia… She told me once she wanted her ashes scattered over the shoe department of Niemen Marcus on a sale day. That was funny when she was alive. Wasn’t anything like as funny once she was gone.” He looked into her eyes. “What I’m trying to say is that Wes and me, we’re not that different. He’s talking to dead people but I think I’m one small step away from being where he is.”

She tightened her grip on his hand. “You’re not alone, Gunn. You and Wesley are with us now. We’re a team. We’re going to help people and solve mysteries and…”

“Have our own theme music?”

It was a relief to see that smile on Gunn’s face. “I’m serious,” she insisted. “We’re the…Tea Shop Detectives now, the four of us.”

Gunn glanced over at Wesley. “Sanity not a requirement for this particular agency then?”

She waved a dismissive hand. “It’s…optional.”

“Like having any detecting abilities?”

“Yes, that’s optional, too. A lot of things that you would imagine would be a basic requirement are optional with this particular agency.” She let go of his hand and rose to her feet reluctantly, steeling herself to face Giles’s pain, but knowing it had to be done. “Can you watch my crystals for me?” As Gunn nodded, she touched his shoulder briefly, and walked around the ragged shin-barking rock that guarded the entrance to the cleft, and stepped into the shadows with Giles.

The sense of evil was so strong here that it was almost choking; a dank after-scent of sulphur still in the air; a darkness so overpowering that she felt she could reach out and touch it. Concentrating, she closed her eyes and tried to follow its trail; at once it vanished in a whiff of smoke, leaving her blundering in darkness without a path or a light. This wasn’t just a place where evil had been done, where there had been the rawness of terror that elicited no mercy, the screams that had been stifled and the sounds that escaped gone unheard by anyone except the glide of screech owls scouring the darkness for prey; this wasn’t just a place of pain and death and that slow outgoing tide of life ebbing with each trickle of spilled blood; this was a place where magic of the darkest kind had touched the stones and left its shadow with theirs.

Giles had one hand touching the cold rock. One didn’t have to be a witch to feel the intensity of his pain. One look at his face and she was in tears again. She couldn’t prevent the salt sting of them trickling down her face as she gazed up at him. “Oh, Giles, I’m so sorry.”

He stared out at the blocks of stone, scatterings of rocks leading the eye to the moors beyond; moors Alicia would not have been able to see because she had died in darkness, by the light of burning torches, like the witches of old. He was half in shadow, the daylight barely finding its way in here to perfectly bisect his face.

“It was my fault,” he admitted quietly. “I was the one who got her into witchcraft. At the time it seemed like the lesser of two evils. A way to get her to reconnect to her power, to herself… It was my fault.”

“It wasn’t.” Willow put her arms around him, afraid of that frozen look on his face. “You can’t blame yourself.”

“I should and I do. There are some mistakes I’m obviously doomed to keep on making.” He touched her hair gently. “But I want to find the people that did this, Willow, and then I want to send them to the darkest hell dimension in which demons have ever lived.”

She looked up at his face again and he was still gazing out at the world Alicia would never see again, and she had never seen him look so close to breaking. She felt a chill go through her and tightened her grip on him, as if she could anchor him here if she only held him long enough.

***

The phone was ringing as they headed up the stairs back to Alicia’s flat. Giles speeded up his pace, twisting the key in the lock and picking up the phone as he was still opening the door wider for the other three. “Hello…?” He dreaded it being a friend or relative of Alicia’s who had not yet heard the news. There had already been one extremely painful call like that and he wasn’t ready to face another on today of all days.

“Giles…?”

Buffy’s voice was at once a shock and a reminder of how just how much he missed her. “Buffy. How lovely to hear from you. Is everything okay?”

“No, everything is not ‘okay’. You’re going through a horrible experience and you won’t let me help. Giles, I’ve called and called.”

In the background he could hear Dawn saying: “And he’s not letting me help either. Tell him that.”

He found himself half-smiling, despite the images of that cave burned into his mind’s eye. He could still smell the stench of fear and blood and death in his nostrils, and the singed cloth of his cuff from when their counter-spell had recoiled like a serpent and almost burned them both alive. If Willow had been a little less powerful, or an instant slower in her reactions, they would both be little piles of ash right now. Buffy’s voice felt like a radio station broadcasting from the world of the living; something he was glad to tune into but which still felt very remote from his present experience. “There’s just nothing you can do.”

“Yes, there is. I can fly over and help you find the bad guys. I shared my power, you know, I didn’t lose it. I’m still the Slayer, just not – the only Slayer.”

“Buffy, honestly we’re handling things. I swear. But it is very good to hear your voice.”

“Why won’t you let me help?” He heard the ache in her voice. “You’ve helped me so much. Why can’t I help you?”

“Because I think that just as you needed to learn how to get along without me, I need to learn how to get along without you.” He sighed as he sat down in the nearest chair, aware of Gunn and Willow tip-toeing around trying not to overhear or to interrupt his call, and of Wesley, perfectly oblivious, sitting back down at the table and opening his disgustingly tatty old book. “I can’t have you running to save me every time I’m in danger. I need to learn how to do things for myself. I did manage to get along without you for nearly forty years, after all, and for only some of those was I either too young to go out by myself or involved in the raising of demons.”

“Let me talk to Willow. She’ll agree with me.”

“I’m sure she will, but that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t. Buffy, honestly, I’m fine.”

“You don’t sound fine,” she said hesitantly. “You sound about as far from fine as anyone can get without actually being – you know – dead.”

He took off his glasses and pinched the bride of his nose to try to stop that embryonic headache from taking hold. “It’s been a rough day.”

“Please, let me come.” She sounded like a little girl asking for permission and it was so very hard not to just give in.

“Buffy, I can’t…” he admitted. “I can’t bear the thought of you and Dawn being in any kind of danger right now. It’s bad enough that Willow is here. But the fact is – she is here, and she’s a very powerful witch, far more powerful than the women who were killed. And Gunn has been fighting vampires for half of his life and Wesley – ”

He could imagine her wince. “How is Wesley?”

“He’s…still adjusting to not being dead. It’s taking rather longer than we hoped.”

“It does take a while. It kind of feels like you left a part of yourself somewhere else and you’ll never get it back.”

Giles felt his heart contract at the thought of all she had been through. “Do you ever get it back?”

“Yes. You actually do. It just takes…time, and people. Patient people with lots of time, and I mentioned the ‘it taking time’ part, right?”

“You did, yes.”

“You know things could be worse,” she suggested.

“How exactly?”

“At least he’s not sleeping with Spike.”

Giles laughed, and wondered how close he was to crying. He put his glasses back on. “And you can’t imagine how grateful I am for that.”

“We miss you,” Buffy said. “We miss all of you. I told Xander he should be home by now. I have all these things in Rome I want to show him. And there are girls here who are pretty and single and…alive. I’d marry him myself just to keep him here right now.”

“I think he’s someone else who needed some time.”

There was a pause before she said wistfully. “I don’t understand why loving someone always has to be so painful. I don’t understand why it can’t be hugs and puppies, just for once. I mean why can’t your friends just be okay and not lose the people that they love and why can’t you not lose the people that you love too?”

“Well, I think probably not dating the undead is a good place from which to start. How is the…um…Immortal?”

“The same,” she admitted.

“Too much of a good thing to give up despite being manifestly unsuitable as a life-partner in every possible way?”

“Pretty much.”

“You know, you’re not setting the best example for Dawn.”

“Like I keep telling her, I’m only making all these mistakes so that she won’t have to. And I also have a ‘Don’t Do What I Do, Just Do What I Say’ t-shirt for special occasions.”

“One day, Buffy, I would really like to hear that you’ve settled down and married a nice chartered accountant called Geoffrey. It really would be the most tremendous weight off my mind.”

“Willow said you wanted Dawn and me to become celibate and spend our time in meditation and reflection.”

“Well, that would be the best possible outcome, of course, but I’ll settle for Geoffrey and a life of tranquillity. The roses around the door would be optional.”

“I don’t think I’m a ‘roses round the door’ kind of gal these days. I think Angel pretty much made that an impossibility. But, hey, I’m ludicrously over-protective and picky about Dawn’s boyfriends, so, that’s got to help, right?”

“And I’m sure she’s very grateful for it.”

“So far, not so much, but I just know she will be one day.”

Dawn’s: “Don’t count on it” was perfectly audible down the line.

He smiled again. “It really is very good to hear from you.”

“And think how much nicer it would be to see us, in person, if you only let us come…”

“Not this time, Buffy,” he said gently. “This time I really need to do this by myself.”

“I don’t like you doing things by yourself,” she reminded him. “I like you doing things with me, where I can keep you safe, and make sure nothing happens to you.”

He bowed his head, unable to repress another smile. “Sometimes you have to let them fly the nest, Buffy, however hard it may be.”

When he put the phone down he found Willow handing him a mug of tea. “It’s hard for her,” the girl explained. “She really doesn’t like you getting into danger and you are kind of a concussion-magnet. You can’t blame her for being anxious.”

“I know.” He sipped the tea and realized it was exactly what he needed. “But I really don’t think that Buffy and Dawn would help the current situation. Dawn would want to adopt Wesley and make him her special project and Buffy would inevitably want to have sex with Gunn and I really don’t…”

“Wait, wait, back up…” Gunn waved a hand. “I’m not seeing the problem here.”

“You were the one that talked about not hiding behind a super-powered cheerleader, weren’t you? Or was that a different conversation I overheard in Westbury?”

“Yeah, but no one said anything about a super-powered cheerleader who wanted to have sex with me, because I think that makes a world of difference.”

“Well, I think you were right the first time and it’s time for the ordinary mortals to do their part to make the world a better place. Buffy’s earned her holiday. The rest of us need to decide what we’re going to do next.”

Willow looked up from reading over Wesley’s shoulder. “Oh, I already know that.”

As she beamed at him, Giles felt decidedly less than relieved. “Why am I now feeling the all-too-familiar sensations of misgiving and unease?” As he also looked over Wesley’s shoulder, he noticed that in the middle of his many incomprehensible spell symbols – ones that appeared nowhere on the book page from which he was apparently transcribing them – Wesley had written ‘tautology’ before going on with another symbol. Recently back from the dead and imperfectly sane he might be, but the hair-splitting school swot he had once been was clearly still alive and well in this Watcher.

Willow said brightly: “Because you’ve realized what I’ve realized.”

Withdrawing his attention from Wesley’s scribbling with some difficulty, Giles focused on her: “Which would be…?”

“That as we can’t find a way to track down the killers, we need them to come after us. Actually, we need them to come after me…”

***

Gunn was glad to escape down to the teashop even if it was only to eat more oddly-named cakes and insubstantial sandwiches. Wesley had insisted on bringing his book and was still copying things from it into his little notebook. He also seemed to be writing out some kind of spell formula on a napkin. Willow and Giles would probably have kept arguing until the sun went down if he hadn’t pointed out that he was hungry and that Wesley needed a cup of tea. As things were, they reluctantly joined him and Wes after a few minutes, and began to eat something called ‘Bakewell Tart’ and more cucumber sandwiches.

Giles was still giving off a kind of black cloud of grief, which had made him terse with Willow about her suggestion and even terser with Wesley about existing. As he sat down he said: “He needs a bath tonight, and clean clothes that fit him. Not to mention a shave and a bloody haircut. I am sick and tired of Wesley looking like the poster child for mental instability.”

“Don’t start,” Gunn warned him.

“You can’t just take it out on Wesley because you’re angry with me,” Willow hissed at him before switching to a reassuring smile for Judith.

“Watch me,” Giles returned grimly.

“Giles, we’ve tried spells to reveal a source of dark incantation and we keep getting nothing, and you and I both know that someone was casting a spell of terrible power and yet we can’t trace it.”

“I concede that it’s troubling that we haven’t yet been able to find a spell that will locate the source of the incantation, but we don’t need to overreact,” Giles insisted. “The magic is in you, absorbed into your bone and blood in a way that no other witch has ever accomplished and I, though I say it myself, am more than ordinarily knowledgeable about the casting of spells to detect dark magic. We just need to keep going until we find the right spell and then trace these people.”

 

“And what if they kill again tonight?”

Gunn sighed. “Willow, I think Giles is right about your plan – it’s not workable. Even apart from the risk to you – which is crazy – there’s no reason for them to come back there. You sitting up on the moors casting little witchy spells to make them come after you isn’t a good plan on all kinds of levels.”

“The place is steeped in sorcery now,” Willow insisted, in between vigorously buttering a fruit scone. “They’re bound to go back there.”

“For all they – or we – know the police have the place staked out,” Giles pointed out.

“More tea anyone?” Judith proffered the teapot and Wesley held up his cup without looking up from his work. 

She gave him a refill and received an absent-minded ‘Thank you’ for her pains. Giles conceded that he would also like another cup of tea and Willow and Gunn also held their cups out.

Judith examined Wesley’s squiggles on his napkin for a moment and then gave him a reassuring smile. “I’m sure you’ll get it eventually, dear…” 

Giles waited until she was out of earshot before murmuring, “I wouldn’t hold your breath.”

Gunn thought about trying to explain that Wesley had always been a functioning crazy person. He could still reason and analyse and research and come up with ideas even when in the middle of a nervous breakdown. He suspected Wesley’s family had always had mental health issues, and had developed this way of dealing with stress; they had the meltdown but they did it in a way that meant they could still do their job; because if you were a Wyndam-Pryce all that mattered was the work you did, of course. He felt a pang of guilt about having just looked at the crazy packaging recently while not remembering the complexity of the man underneath.

He reached across to touch Wesley’s arm, getting his attention. He gave him what he hoped was a normal sort of smile. “How’s the research going?”

Wesley gazed at him for a moment and Gunn could see Giles’s point about him looking as if he was part of some kind of outreach program. He really did look like all kinds of crap. If he could just sleep at night instead of having whispered conversations with people who weren’t there, Gunn suspected that would solve most of his problems right there. He also thought Wesley had a point that cleaning him up and putting him in new clothes wasn’t going to change the confusion in Wesley’s mind. He squeezed Wesley’s arm gently. “Wes? The research? How’s it going?”

“I’ve discovered several possible incantations that might require the blood of witches – all of them very dark and powerful in nature – but none that explain why Giles and Willow haven’t been able to locate the source of the spell. There was something I studied at the Academy that I’m sure was relevant, but I can’t remember what it was.”

Giles looked up sharply. “Ways of concealing spells?”

“Something to do with witches. A cult that opposed them. I can’t remember where I read it, and I don’t have all my books here.” He looked around the teashop as if they might magically appear. “Where are my books?”

“The books you had at the Hyperion or the books you had at Wolfram & Hart?” Gunn asked him.

Wesley frowned in confusion. “I’m not sure.”

“Some of them are in storage, Wesley,” Giles explained, rather more patiently than usual. “But the books you had access to at Wolfram & Hart are gone. They stayed with the firm when you…left it.”

Gunn tapped the book Wesley had bought in the bookshop in Knaresborough. “What’s so special about this book?”

“It’s very rare. It has spells that other books don’t have.”

Gunn looked an enquiry to Giles who shrugged but picked the book up, adding a belated ‘May I?’ to Wesley only as an afterthought.

“Please do.” Wesley picked up his teacup and sipped from it.

Gunn watched Giles looking through the book, hoping that Wesley would prove to be saner than anyone realized, that he would have discovered something Giles and Willow had missed. He despaired of getting Giles to see the guy that Gunn had known; the Wesley who was cleverer than anyone he’d ever met; who could research anything, and always knew the answer to every question. If it turned out that all Wesley was doing with these notes he was making was the equivalent of typing ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ over and over then Gunn didn’t think he could take it. Because then he’d have to acknowledge what they were all in denial about, that when Willow had brought Wesley back, she’d either brought him back wrong, or missing something, or brain-damaged him in the process. Which would mean Gunn really had lost everyone because even Wesley could never be Wesley again.

Giles was frowning over the book without any sign of comprehension. “Wesley, I can see references to the usual incantations for raising demons, but I don’t see anything here that wouldn’t have been revealed by Willow’s spell.”

Wesley leaned across, looked at the page Giles was looking at, and then pointed to something on the page. Gunn looked at Giles hopefully, wanting to see the man get that look someone got when something was revealed to them, a sudden ‘Oh!’ of realization. But Giles just sighed and took off his glasses to clean them before saying, very quietly: “Wesley, that’s just a fault in the binding, a blank half page under the last spell. There’s nothing there.”

Gunn felt the last of his hope dissolving, thinking dully that, of course, the spells Wesley was so diligently transcribing didn’t exist. Most of the people he was talking to these days didn’t exist either. That was Wesley’s gift at the moment – seeing things that weren’t there; even if they were just things he needed to see.

“There’s a spell,” Wesley insisted.

Giles handed the book to Willow who looked at it and sighed. “Wesley, Giles is right, this half of the page is blank.” She looked so sorry for not only Wesley but for Gunn as well, that he wasn’t sure he could take it.

“He’s going to get better,” he heard himself saying; except it didn’t sound much like him; more like a guy who was talking too loud and this close to bursting into tears.

“It’s right there.” Wesley took the book back. “I can see it.”

Gunn abruptly rose to his feet; realizing the only thing he disliked more than Giles getting pissed with Wesley was him looking sorry for him; all grave and regretful, as if Wesley was a lost cause who could only be cared for now. He didn’t want Giles reminding himself to be more patient and regretting his earlier words, the way Giles was so clearly doing right now, he wanted him being challenged by Wesley and the two of them throwing book references and spells at each other, and Wesley standing up to the guy and being his equal.

“This isn’t who he is,” he managed with difficulty. He knew he was being too tall and too loud in a place this quiet and dark and cosy but he couldn’t help it.

“I’ll do the spell,” Willow said hastily. “I’ll do it tonight. No more hallucinations.”

Gunn thought about the Hyperion and how sometimes, out of nowhere, he could still smell that baby milk scent of Connor, the way it had got all over them because they all had little bits of baby spew on their shoulders, and they got into the habit of just wiping it off instead of changing their clothes right away, because any minute now someone would hand the baby over and he’d probably spit up something on them again. The way it had seemed so natural, so fast, that you just learned to do things one-handed, opening drawers, and picking up books, and filling the kettle, and eating your lunch, as the baby got passed around, until you hardly noticed sometimes if you were carrying him or not. He thought of being able to talk to that Fred and that Cordelia, being able to see them again; Fred giggly and a little crazy, and rocking Connor, and Cordelia full of so much heart and courage making those doting faces at the baby.

Then he thought of Wesley just sitting in a corner staring at nothing, because he couldn’t see the dead or the living any more; the past as lost to him as it was to Gunn.

“No, just – leave him alone. Let him keep what he’s got.” He turned away.

Willow said: “Gunn, why don’t you…?”

He said shortly: “I’m going for a walk.” Then he was crossing between all those little tables and those women with their purses, and that kid in the buggy gazing up at him as if he was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen, and then the bell was dinging, just like the bell in the bookshop, and he was out into the thin English daylight, with tears streaming down his face he didn’t want anyone seeing.

***

The air felt slightly singed; the throbbing in his temples very like the one he would get when there was a thunderstorm sitting over the house. Except this time, it felt to Giles as if the thunderstorm was actually happening in his head. He looked around the room, grimacing at the wreckage; the print whose glass had been shattered, the scorch mark on the wall; the burnt place on the arm of the sofabed.

“Well,” Gunn said, from the safety of the doorway into the kitchen. “I guess you can wave goodbye to your security deposit.”

Giles looked up to a glare that told him Gunn wasn’t going to be forgiving him any time soon for nearly setting Wesley on fire. The man was still standing squarely in front of Wesley and had been every since the tongue of white flame had licked out of the circle in which Giles and Willow had been casting their spells of revelation, the flame that would undoubtedly have set at least Wesley’s clothes alight if Gunn hadn’t pulled him to safety. 

“I said I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well, set yourself on fire next time.”

Willow sighed. “I think we nearly did that too. Several times.”

Wesley licked his finger, tested the air, and then tasted it. “Copper.” He took out his notebook and wrote that down, heading back towards the table where his books were, and only stopping when Gunn’s grip on his arm arrested his forward movement. He looked at Gunn’s fingers and then up at Gunn in some confusion.

“Wait,” Gunn told him. “Have you two finished?”

Giles shrugged. “Well, we haven’t learned anything but… Yes, for the moment, I’m completely out of ideas.”

Gunn let Wesley go. “Just – if those two start up with the abracadabras again – duck.”

“Thank you for the vote of confidence, Gunn.” Giles rose to his feet, wincing at the way his joints ached as he stood up. He was definitely getting too old for his body not to rebel at having that much dark magic channelled through it. 

“Hey, I call it like I see it, and so far I’ve seen you two achieve diddly except nearly killing Wes and me and trashing this apartment.”

“I’m actually a very powerful witch,” Willow protested. “I nearly destroyed the world once.”

“You keep telling yourself that, Willow.” Gunn pulled out Wesley’s chair for him, and picked up the books that had been scattered when he had yanked him away from the white flame. 

“No, Willow’s right,” Giles insisted. “She is a very powerful witch. She managed to harness the power of an ancient weapon to share the Slayer strength with every potential in the world. She brought your friend back from the dead.”

“Yeah, and he’s still thrilled about that.” Gunn picked a feather out of Wesley’s hair from when their spell had belched back all its power and filled the air with flame and rage, spewing their spell-making ingredients at them like a whirlwind. 

“We weren’t trying to hurt him,” Willow said meekly. “Or set the apartment on fire.”

“You still nearly did both of those things, so how about next time you want to make with the Glinda thing you do it outside?”

“You’re missing the point.” Giles brushed flakes of ash from his slightly singed sleeve. “Any one of those spells should have worked. We’ve used them before and they’ve worked before. There are no effective counterspells against them.”

Wesley looked up at Giles for a moment as if trying to recall a memory. “There were extra lessons on alternate Wednesdays. If you took them you weren’t allowed to take classes with Mrs Taschen.”

Giles frowned. “Dear Lord, was Mrs Taschen still teaching at the academy when you attended, Wesley? She was about a hundred and three when I was there. I swear she did actually fly to classes on her broomstick.”

“I had lessons with Professor Brewer instead.”

“Never heard of him.” Giles turned to Gunn. “If you’ve quite finished glowering, Willow and I would rather like to drown our disappointment in tea.”

“My father said I had to take them because I would be more useful in research than studying practical witchcraft. On account of never amounting to anything.”

Giles had been heading for the kitchen, when Wesley’s words stopped him in his tracks. He turned around. “Wesley, you were head boy of the Academy. You were the youngest Watcher I’ve ever heard of to be allocated even one Slayer, let alone two. What more could your father possibly have asked of you?”

Wesley looked up at Giles. “Perhaps he wanted me to be more like you.”

“Well, he had a funny way of showing it. My father encouraged me to think for myself. He didn’t always like my thoughts when I did, but he did at least think that’s what I should be doing. When did your father ever tell you – even once – to trust your own judgement?”

Wesley dropped his gaze to his books. “He said he’d trust my judgement the day I developed any. I killed him.”

Giles put a hand up to his aching head. “No, Wesley, you didn’t. I saw him in London only a few months ago. He was quite well, I assure you. And very much – as he has always been.”

“It was a robot, Wes, remember?” Gunn put in.

“I think I frightened Fred. I know I frightened myself.” He looked up at Giles again, trying to see him, it seemed, as if some part of Giles wasn’t yet in focus. “I didn’t think I was angry with him. I just thought I was…afraid – of the next thing he might say or do to me. I don’t know why I shot him so many times. I spent so many years trying to make him proud of me and then it was just a gun and all those bullets and a trigger I couldn’t stop pulling.”

He hated when Wesley looked like that – when he could see, not just the annoying little twerp who’d first turned up in Sunnydale behind those haunted eyes, but the teenager he must once have been, who had such high hopes of becoming the best Watcher in the history of Watcherdrom. He almost asked him what his father had done to him. If he’d beaten him, terrorised him, if there had been ritual punishments to make the blood run cold, but then realized that it didn’t matter now. Wesley was what he was and it couldn’t be undone by talking about his father; in fact he was so far beyond that point it was almost funny. Instead he said: “Would you like a cup of tea, Wesley?”

Wesley’s face cleared and he looked relieved at the distraction. “Yes, please.”

Giles gave him what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

 

They had gone back to the books. Gunn, perhaps still suspecting them of wanting to incinerate him and Wesley, had suggested that Wesley continue his research in their room. Giles had noticed that Wesley, despite being perfectly capable of saying ‘No, thank you’ to most of the things Giles suggested, was usually happy to acquiesce to Gunn’s ideas, making him think that, underneath the delusions, Wesley still had quite firm opinions about what he did and did not want to do. 

He and Willow had taken over the sofa bed and were both working their way through a stack of spellbooks, trying to find a spell they hadn’t yet tried, that might work where their others had failed.

“I haven’t forgotten what I did.”

Giles looked up in surprise to find Willow gazing at him from distressed green eyes. People often asked if she were his daughter, especially witches visiting the coven for the first time; picking up on an aura without troubling to think through the differences of accent. Sometimes he almost said ‘yes’, because on some level she and Buffy and Dawn all were the daughters he had never had. But he doubted their fathers would have accepted that he had taken on that role, and it was true that he had never been there when they were growing up. Sometimes it felt as if he had been; sometimes it felt as if there was no day since their births he had not witnessed, so completely had their lives bled into his.

He could hear the low murmur of Gunn and Wesley’s voices, a background hum that he had been finding oddly comforting. Exhausting and irritating though those two often were, he was growing used to having them around, and for all the man’s occasionally volatile temperament he suspected he might have cause to be very glad of Gunn before this was over. And if he still had the occasional pang of guilt about the way he had treated Wesley in the past, he was being given every chance to make amends now. But Willow was part of his life, one of those people he had grown to love as if they were his own children when in Sunnydale; someone who had wept for Jenny, wept for Buffy; lost and found herself in front of his watchful gaze. Someone he had saved.

“I know,” he told her gently.

“I wouldn’t want you to think I think it’s a joke now. ‘Oh, I nearly destroyed the world once. Look how powerful I am.’ Because I still see what I did. I still dream about it – I think I’m that person again, only this time, I’m watching me and I can’t stop myself. All those things I did – to Buffy, to Xander, to you…there isn’t a day I don’t think about it. I killed a man. I tortured him and then I killed him, and I’ll always be a murderer. And I’ll always be sorry for what I did.”

“I know,” he repeated. “You don’t need to tell me.”

“I don’t want you thinking I don’t remember all you’ve done for me. I just want to be able to do this one thing – stop these people and make sure they don’t kill again. All this power, the way I got it… what I did with it – it’s only bearable if I can think maybe it was for a reason in the end because I can do more good than I could do before. Except I’m not doing any good. I’m not doing anything.”

He reached out and patted her shoulder. “Willow, you’re doing everything you can.”

“But it’s not enough. And I don’t understand why it isn’t working.”

Sighing, he looked down at the book of spells in front of him. “Neither do I. These spells are tried and tested. They should have revealed the place where the evil is emanating from by now and yet…nothing.”

“Perhaps it’s not the spell, it’s the place?” She picked up another book. “I’m going to research places with special properties – ones shielded from spells or something. There has to be an explanation.”

“Like Wesley, I have something in the back of my mind, but I think it was a throwaway comment from thirty years ago, and I can’t remember it now. If Wesley were only able to… I just wish I knew if anything he’s saying or doing has any logic behind it or if it’s all cuckoo clock time.” He looked around the room, and there were still a few traces of Alicia. No one had moved her stack of CDs next to her hi-fi. The paperback she had been reading was still on the coffee table. She had laid it face down instead of using a bookmark. He never had been able to get her out of that. Sighing, he leaned across and picked up the book, keeping his thumb in the page she had reached. Music & Silence. There was a price in pencil written inside the cover, so she had evidently not bought it new. Someone else had got a chance to finish it and knew how the story ended, but Alicia had not. She had been so close to the end as well, only a few pages to go. That was probably why she’d been late, why she’d just left her sweater inside out and her cup of coffee on the table instead of rinsing out the mug; trying to get to the end before she had to leave to meet Karin. She had always needed to be dragged away from books. He knew he should just close it, because the truth was that she was never going to finish it now, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do that yet, and plucked a tissue out of the box, carefully marking the page she would never finish, before he put the book back down.

“Are you angry with Angel?” Willow asked quietly.

He looked at her in surprise. “Should I be?”

“Because he didn’t keep his people safe.”

“I’m sure he tried.” Giles thought of Buffy hitting the ground in front of him; her body snapping on impact like a broken doll. “Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you do, they still die.”

“I think I’m a little bit angry with him,” she confessed. “And at the same time I feel so sorry for him because I think all he really wanted was to have a family of his own and protect them and all do good together, and instead…”

Giles thought of the rain-swept alley and Gunn’s blood soaked fingers; Wesley lying dead on the chequered floor of a warlock’s stronghold. “Perhaps I’m a little angry with him, too. He ate every member of his first family and – had sex with every member of his second family, perhaps he should have considered the possibility that some people, however strong their need to gather a family around themselves, are not suited to family life.”

“Would you have taken Connor?”

Giles looked at her in shock. “I don’t know, Willow. I wasn’t there. I do wish Wesley had…”

“Told Angel about the prophecy?”

“No, certainly not. But would it have killed him to pick up the phone and call me? I could have helped him. I could at least have given him someone to discuss it with.”

“He probably thought that if he told you, you’d tell Buffy, and then she’d tell Angel.”

Giles opened his mouth to refute it and then sighed. “It’s not what I would have done, but I can see why Wesley might have thought it would be. He and I never really learned to communicate when he was in Sunnydale. Perhaps if I’d been more patient he might not have…”

“Giles, he wasn’t unhappy in LA. He loved those people. Why do you think he’s still seeing them even after they’re dead? We would never have cared about him like they did. Not then. Now, it’s different. Now, it’s just the four of us…”

Giles didn’t really want to accept that it was now ‘the four of us’. He was still thinking of it being him and Willow, with Gunn and Wesley a separate unit who temporarily needed their help, and that once Wesley was well again, Gunn and Wesley would go…elsewhere. But when he considered it logically, he realized that he could hardly abandon two ordinary mortals with no special skills to the mercies of the Senior Partners and the Bringers. The First had been defeated but it had not been destroyed and all Watchers were still targets, and that was without starting on the vengeance the Circle of the Black Thorn might still be seeking.

“This isn’t exactly how I was planning to spend my retirement, Willow.”

“You’d die of boredom if you retired,” she assured him.

“I think I might prefer that to having my entrails ripped out or being exsanguinated by a vampire.”

“It could be worse…”

“How?”

“You could be helping Faith and Wood to train the potentials.”

Giles sat back in the sofa, thinking about all those teenage girls; the constant clamour and bustle of them, the thought of steering them all through puberty and having to listen to endless stories of their latest boyfriends; the pain of them getting themselves killed. “Well, all right, when you put it like that, I concede that Gunn and Wesley don’t look so bad.”

“See, Wesley may be crazy, but he’s not going to talk to you about who he’s dating.”

“And for that I am grateful.” As Willow reached forward to pick up another book, he thought how pale she looked. “You’ve done everything humanly possible, you know, Willow. We’ll find a solution. It’s just a case of discovering the right spell.”

Willow stroked a finger across the worn fabric of the sofa. “I had enough power to kill and destroy. Why don’t I have enough power for this?”

“No one is suggesting that you forget what you did. Anyone with as much power as you should be aware of how much harm they could do if they lost control. But you should remember the good you’ve done as well.” Giles bent his head to look at her face. “Willow, what happened to Alicia isn’t your fault. We are going to find these people and we’re going to stop them doing whatever it is they’re attempting to do.”

There was a pause before she said: “I’m good with you breaking something if you want to.”

Giles had to acknowledge her perspicacity. “Maybe later.”

“You don’t have to be the grown up any more. We’re all grown ups too, now. You don’t always have to be the one who’s calm and sensible and doesn’t cry. You’re allowed to have Giles Time.”

Giles thought about the past, about feeling the demon enter his body, the rush of it, that incredible high of being possessed, feeling for those brief minutes, more alive, more empowered, more himself than he ever did when alone; wanting to hold onto this feeling, not have to sink into the inevitable aftermath of the black dog low after the iridescent high. He remembered the clarity of setting out after Angelus, determined to burn him alive, not caring if he lived or died. He closed his eyes. “Perhaps you’re not the only one with control issues, Willow.”

“When this is over you need to go up there and say goodbye, alone, without having to babysit us.”

Again, he saw a little girl clapping her hands as her cake rose up, a teenager gasping in disbelieving pleasure as she floated a candle across the room. He wondered if what he really needed to say to Alicia was not ‘Goodbye’ but ‘I’m sorry’. 

“Perhaps I will.” He picked up another book. “For the moment we have work to do…” But even as he hoisted the heavy book onto his lap and began to search through the archaic text for a spell that would work, he could see Alicia’s battered little paperback sitting on the table, the story that she would never finish, the end that she would never now read.

***

Dreams had never been as deep as now; there was an ocean of sleep above his head that had to be traversed for every waking; layers of pressing darkness painted in a Kandinsky blue. He slept so fitfully; the least sound disturbed him – yet there was always this long haul from unconsciousness to waking, of late. It was the vicious circle of the insomniac, Wesley knew that. In the privacy of his own mind, there was clarity; words assembled themselves in sentences that made perfect sense. There was just this grey numbness, a shore between himself and the waking world that made it difficult for him to be the man he was in his head when interacting with others. If he were honest, the only times he really felt like himself any more, was when talking to people who probably weren’t there.

He knew that this difficulty in awakening from dreams, this fugue state of semi-consciousness segueing into breath-rationed panic was the inevitable response of the very recently nearly-dead. Or actually dead in his case. He had been here before, after all. He had fallen asleep trying not to think about the knife slashing his throat, and the shock of that sudden cold, the strength no longer in his limbs as he fell and the blood spilled, and life began to leave him, edging further away from him with each moment, each breath, a cost in bloodloss with each heartbeat pumping it into the chill night air. He had woken up streaming with sweat, feeling the blade again, or feeling the pillow pressing down and the air not coming. This was not his first bout of post-traumatic stress disorder, but there was no Lilah this time to tease and tantalize and arouse and madden him back into the land of the traumatized but alive. Gunn was exhausted and fast asleep, still recovering from his own wound, his own near-death experience, and from the losses that were making Wesley begin to feel as pitted and fissured as Bath stone after a century of acid rain.

His past had lot a great deal of its clarity. It was difficult for him to differentiate between events that had occurred and dreams that he’d had. When he let his mind wander to possibilities they began to solidify; if he spent too long imagining they began to bed themselves into his mind like memories. He could ‘remember’ lives where he had married Cordelia and they had endured a disastrous wedding night in the frosty chill of the second-best guest bedroom of his parents’ house, the pipes clanking mournfully while she wept and wept for all the dreams of hers to which he would never have access but was most assuredly not fulfilling. He could remember days in Sunnydale that he had never spent; sharing a home with Giles to their mutual exasperation as he became more whiny and petulant and Giles began to drink with ever more focused concentration. And all the different days in Los Angeles that he had never lived. That time in the Hyperion after Fred had chosen him at the ballet and they had been so happy. That time when Cordelia had come back from her holiday and sought him out and made the others grant him their forgiveness. Or the emptiness of a life in which Angel had never returned from his quest to bring down Wolfram & Hart; where he and Gunn had been shredded finer and finer by too many brushes with death, too many missions only half-accomplished and their evenings spent holding a Cordelia weeping from the unending pain in her head. It required a focused effort of will to sort between the possibilities and remember the truth. The truth that had been lost to him for half a painless year, when there had never been a baby he had kidnapped; when his throat had never been slashed; but when there had been so much confusion about a time of estrangement; wondering why it was that he had slept with Lilah; wondering why Angel was so angry with him on occasion when they had so rarely ever disagreed.

He had not been able to indulge in sexual fantasies about himself and Fred, it was true; too much of an intrusion; but he could remember trying to imagine how it was between her and Gunn. It troubled him a little that he had known so well how Gunn looked in the instant before he pressed a kiss onto wine-reddened lips. The way his brown eyes changed from amused and fond to heated and wanting and full of something that had perhaps been very close to love. Knowing or thinking that he knew how much Gunn liked to nuzzle at a long slender throat, not the arousing crush of teeth that Lilah liked to bestow, but kisses so gentle they barely brushed the surface. 

He had thought of the two of them through a haze of staked vampire dust, imagining the grey particles of their last kill still attached to their sweat-sheened skin as they reached for each other in Gunn’s truck; aroused by how close they had come to death; how it was adhering to them still while they pulsed with life and heat and desire. He could imagine too well the contortions one would have to undergo in the passenger seat to find a semi-comfortable position. The sound of Gunn’s zip in his imagination carried an echo in his memory from which he always shied away. He could think of Gunn’s fingers, strong and dexterous at once, and how a warm hand felt on a warm thigh, women he had touched, hands that had touched him; how a woman tasted down there, how it felt to be licked; the way the body thrilled to that unexpected flick of tongue into secret entranceways. He knew Fred could be loud and Gunn was usually quiet, fond whispers, muffled grunts; that Gunn was unselfish and liked to give pleasure while, after five years in a cave, being touched was still a novelty to Fred so extraordinary that it was sometimes enough to make her scream. Wesley had always understood that about her, because being touched was still a novelty to him, too.

He had spent so long wanting Gunn out of the picture; just him and Fred alone together, and yet the only time he could think of her naked, imagine the ridges of her spine a twist of desire, a pleasurable jolt along her narrow back in response to a thrust, imagine her head back and her throat exposed, her collarbone a lickable perfection, or her pelvis clenched tight with pleasure on the brink of orgasm, was if he put Gunn back into the scene. He had never doubted that Gunn knew the way to make her whimper with breathless pleasure; he was not quite as convinced that he and Fred alone would have been able to find their way. Perhaps he’d never wanted to be in Gunn’s place, after all, just somewhere in the middle, and all those times when he had tried to come between them, that was, as it turned out, exactly the place where he’d wanted to end up.

He wanted to wake Gunn and ask him if they had ever been lovers; not because he cared about the answer, just because he didn’t know. It felt like something a man should remember, who he had kissed and not. He was almost certain that he and Angel never had. He remembered the vampire naked and on top of him but he could also remember the circumstances, a time of Angel’s angry aroused confusion over Darla; he was pretty sure that he had been fully clothed and that the vampire’s erection, vivid though it was in his memory, had not been any fault of his.

Cordelia had told him that, in that other dimension where she had been an actress and Angel a madman, he and Gunn had been lovers. She had described it well enough that he had a clear picture in his head – their cluttered apartment, the main room given up to an unhinged Angel who was not always safe to approach. The two of them hanging on by their fingernails as they all edged closer to the abyss. He had wondered if he and Gunn had become lovers before or after Angel had gone insane. What the dreams of the Wesley in that world had once been; how they had foundered, or if this was a life he had found in some way satisfying.

He remembered feeling safe when Gunn was with them and a little anxious when he was not; that seemed to be true – there were too many memories of those feelings for it to be only a stray sensation. He remembered them staying at Cordelia’s apartment sometimes, getting drunk on occasion, falling asleep on the same bed. He didn’t remember if they had really kissed or if he just remembered dreaming that they had and the embarrassment of waking from that dream to find Gunn’s head on the pillow next to his. He remembered feeling filled with peace and contentment, of being able to love himself for the first time in his life, being able to forgive himself for taking Connor, and feeling absolutely contented in Gunn’s company, the man an extension of Jasmine, of the world, of their molecules being all connected, their souls indivisible because they were all united in their love for Her. He just couldn’t remember if they had ever really had sex or he had just tried to imagine the possibilities once and the images had lodged. It didn’t feel in any way important to him whether they had or hadn’t, which worried him a little, as he suspected it probably made a difference; there were probably things one did or did not say and do around people with whom one had once had sex that were not a cause for concern if one had only ever been friends. 

He missed Angel and Fred the most acutely, although he also missed Cordelia, Lorne, and – bizarrely – Illyria. He missed her asking him questions and demanding his attention, a cross between a god, a child, and an impossibly temperamental cat. He worried about Spike. The vampire had seemed on the point of rediscovering some direction for his life when the Black Thorn had possibly ended it. He wasn’t sure if Spike had done enough to qualify for redemption, but he seriously doubted it, and it worried him that the Powers might decide he was unworthy of either resurrection or forgiveness and abandon him to a hell dimension. Although he had taken it for granted at the time, an irrelevance amidst so much turmoil, he had a clear memory of Spike’s anxious face, someone who had never had a family of his own, suddenly finding himself responsible for Angel’s; taking on the burden of them without any hesitation, letting Wesley make decisions while Spike watched from the sidelines, willing to put his body between a possibly evil Angel and theirs, because they were human and he was a vampire. He wondered, honestly, how souled vampires saw it – as their responsibility as stronger creatures to protect the weak, or an act of penance from the ones who had once fed on them, their lives worth less than that of the humans because the humans were less steeped in blood. He wondered if they even knew themselves.

As he wasn’t strictly sane any more he wondered why he couldn’t just tell himself that Fred was with Cordelia. Embrace a fantasy in which Illyria had been painlessly destroyed and Fred’s soul restored and she was happy with Cordelia in some heaven for people who had strived and struggled to do what was right at great personal cost and been rewarded in the end. He wished he could tell himself that in words that carried some conviction. But the comforting lies just washed over him like rain, and when they melted away his beliefs remained unchanged. The very best that he could hope for was that Fred was in limbo somewhere, lost and irretrievable until Illyria was gone, and he could never wish Illyria gone because she was all that remained of Fred.

It didn’t seem fair that with all of this mist and confusion that there should be this resolute realism too. He wanted to be lied to again. He wanted someone to tell him that all his friends were happy in the afterlife of their choosing and something lay ahead of him and Gunn except more pain and death.

“Sorry, Wes, no can do.”

He turned over in shock to find Angel sitting on the bed next to him. “Angel…?” He gaped at him in astonishment. “I thought you were…?”

That slow smile, like ice water melting down his spine, the surprise and relief turning to a trickle of unease. “Off on some noble mission to help the poor, oppressed and stupid? Uh…no, Wes, that was just your crushy little fanboy fantasy. I’m the morning after – the chill reality. We both know my name, and it isn’t ‘Angel’.”

Mixed in with the fear was a healthy dose of disbelief. “So, I’m supposed to believe that – next to Buffy – the thing most likely to give Angel perfect happiness is being set upon by thousands of demonic apocalyptic warriors in a back alley in downtown Los Angeles?”

Angelus leaned in close. “You always did get snippy when you were feeling defensive. And think about it for a minute… Think about what it means to wake up every morning with all those crimes in your mind that you can’t ever undo, but you haven’t earned the right to stop yet, you can’t stop trying to make amends because of all the terrible things you did – it’s not your call when the helping the helpless stops, even though you know it’s pointless, even though you know for every one you save a thousand others died, even though you know you killed too many to ever really atone. What are you really waiting for? A sign from on high that you’re forgiven? Well, the last two ones of those turned out to be lies. Or a stop sign you’re not allowed to ignore? What are all warriors of the people really fighting for except the right to get off the damned train?”

“If you think Angel welcomed you, that he ever wanted to give up his responsibilities and leave the path clear for you – you’re wrong.”

“And you’re stupid, Wes. Always have been – the kind of stupid that only really smart guys are. You think Buffy took a swallow dive to oblivion out of duty? She did it to get a rest.”

“It was an act of love,” Wesley told him tersely. “Something you can’t understand because you’re incapable of love.”

“Being incapable of it doesn’t mean I don’t understand it. I’ve been using love for centuries. It’s the best weapon of all – Holtz should have taught you that. There’s no pain without love – no point in arranging a man’s murdered children as if they’re just sleeping in their beds if you don’t know how much more it’s going to hurt him when he realizes they’re dead. That wail of anguish from the sole survivor of a massacre – that’s all about love; using it to make the game more fun. Like the way Angel used your love for him to make it hurt so much worse when he pretended he was going to forgive you before he tried to smother the life out of your scrawny throat-slit little body.”

That memory had kept all its clarity; fresh as a knife blade across skin; the screaming, the pillow, the breath that wasn’t coming while all that hatred and spittle and absolute rejection was rained down upon him. He tried to keep his concentration, not letting Angelus derail him from what was important – which was that Angelus could not exist. “I don’t believe that Angel wanted an end to his life so greatly that the act of his death would be enough to release you.”

“Well, that’s where you’re wrong. And the Senior Partners don’t have a problem with me. I’m the guy they’ve been waiting for all this time. As the sword came for Angel’s neck, he damned near came thinking about it, an end to all of it, finally getting away from all the whiny little humans demanding that he be their champion. And there I was, and the Senior Partners froze time, pulled me out of it, then sent their hordes back to hell. Think about it. They sucked Angel into their machinery – with a little help from his friends, right, Wes? – and then they set about corrupting him. But you don’t corrupt a champion with fast cars and necro-tempered glass. You corrupt him with a nice shiny battle and a nice shiny cause. You lure him in and you let him play out his own treachery, and then you give him what he’s always wanted – a hero’s death. Then you’ve got him just where you always wanted him. I’m a mercenary for the higher powers all right these days, Wesley, but the higher powers I work for run Wolfram & Hart.”

“I don’t believe you!” Wesley tried to push him away and Angelus caught his wrist and twisted it hard enough to make him gasp, feeling the bone grate under his fingers. 

“Be quiet or I’ll snap your wrist like a twig.”

“You’re lying.” Wesley gazed at the face that was so like Angel’s and yet so unlike it at the same time. All that mockery and cruelty where on Angel’s face there had been compassion and decency. “You don’t exist. You’re just a delusion. You’re just a handful of my doubts made imaginary flesh.”

Angelus transferred his grip to Wesley’s throat and slammed him back against the bed head. “Hush, you’ll wake Gunn. And for imaginary flesh, don’t you think I’m kind of…corporeal?” He tightened his grip, making Wesley gasp. “Of course, this could just be a memory of how it feels to be grabbed by the throat by your noble champion and choked half to death, because, let’s face it, he did that to you a few times. Smacked you around a few times, too, didn’t he? And you just took it. The way you always do. Let your father wipe his feet on you for years, dressing up ritual humiliation as lessons you needed to learn; let the boys at school do it; let Buffy do it, let Giles do it. You had to go crazy to grow even half a backbone. How pathetic is that?”

“You’re not real…” Wesley managed breathlessly.

“That stunt you pulled with the Orpheus – you and my little Faith – that was a big mistake. Faith was meant to be mine. Buffy was fine for the sappy souled version of me but when you’re soulless you need a queen worthy, and a psychopathic Slayer would have been just the ticket. She had such a gift for darkness – so much imagination when it came to inflicting pain – well, you remember. But, no, you had to screw that up, the two of you and your nauseating little mission to put the genie back in the box you opened.”

“Bottle…” Wesley gasped. “Genies live in bottles. Pandora’s box did not contain any djinns.”

Angelus squeezed his throat harder. “You feeling it now, Wes? All the air you’re not getting – the blackness spreading from that white supernova in front of your eyes? Don’t you think it’s time we talked about my plans for you? I know you’ve wondered. The things I would have done to you – amazing things. Acts of such depravity they’d make the imagination soar and splinter into a thousand pinpoints of pain. We could have taken our time, a slow build up to the inevitable climax because, let’s face it, Wes, madness has always been your true north; it was always just a case of getting the compass needle to spin that way. And you’re dangerous when you’re insane even with a soul – ask that junkie you stabbed, that guy you kneecapped, the one you shot or – hey, we could just ask Gunn.”

The blackness had almost overwhelmed him when Angelus released his fingers enough to let him breath, keeping his hand in place but letting him snatch in the desperate gulps of oxygen he needed.

“You could have been my masterwork, Wes,” Angelus said in mock regret. “Instead of the washed up failure you turned out to be. And as for all that mooning over Fred – you want to know why she thought she loved you? Because she had no clue who you really were, that’s why. If she’d remembered that you took Connor she wouldn’t have touched you with the long end of a dirty pole, and that was a great way you chose to commemorate her death – acting like even more of a psychopath than usual. Way to honour her memory. What was stabbing Gunn really about anyway? Pissed with him because he got to pork her and you never did?” 

Still gasping for air, he pushed Angelus’ wrist away. “Get away from me.”

“Sure you don’t wanna fuck? I mean – I’ve come such a long way. And it would make a change from making out with the corpse of your dead girlfriend – for both of us.”

“Leave me alone.” His heart was still hammering in his chest. “You’re not him and you’re not here.” He scrambled off the bed and began to back up towards the door.

“I was always with you, Wes. Fred walked with heroes every day and Angel walked with me. There was never that much of a difference between us.” Angelus looked down at the sleeping Gunn. “He could die so easily, couldn’t he? One snap of the neck, a sword, a gun, a stray bullet meant for someone else – Willow could tell you about that. A thousand ways that he could leave you like the rest of them did and there wouldn’t be anything you could do to stop it. Supposing he isn’t already dead, which, let’s face it, is the most likely scenario here…”

Wesley realized that he had let Angelus get between him and Gunn and didn’t know whether to try to lure the vampire away or attempt to get back to the bed. Angelus settled matters by standing up, smiling at him mockingly. “He did fuck you, by the way, in case you were wondering. He was too high on Jasmine at the time to know just how sick to his stomach that was going to make him feel when he was himself again. Because – trust me – it makes him want to vomit when he thinks about it now. But then you were never very good in bed with anyone who wasn’t evil, were you? No wonder Fred never wanted you the way Illyria did. You really should have let her – we both know you’d have liked it. Necrophilia’s always been your thing. That’s why you should just come back with me.”

Yanking open the door, Wesley backed out into the sitting room, Angelus following him with that hateful, mocking smile on his face. 

“Come on, Wes. Let me set you free. Come and be my masterwork in hell. Let Lilah hear you scream – you know how she always enjoyed that.”

“Stay away from her.” Wesley backed up another pace. 

“Don’t worry. She likes the things we do. You’d like it too. Just give into all that suppurating darkness inside yourself – embrace it – all that cruelty and self-hatred and glittering insanity. Come and scream and bleed and let me tear you into all the pieces you think you deserve to be; let me scatter you like rice at a wedding because Cordelia and Fred and Angel were champions and heroes and they’re lost forever while you were always nothing. Come and be with the other person in the world who knows you don’t deserve to be alive.”

“Get away from me.” Wesley tripped over something and fell down heavily. He had always stood up to Angelus in the past but this time he felt as if the grief was overwhelming, robbing him of all his defiance.

“Wesley…?” 

He twisted around in shock to find Giles in his pyjamas, looking down at him anxiously from his place on the sofa. 

“Please, make him leave,” he breathed. 

“Make who leave, Wesley?” Giles asked, quite gently.

“Angelus.” Wesley gazed up at the vampire, who blew him a mocking kiss.

“I can’t see him. You’ll have to tell me where he is.”

“Don’t forget to tell Giles that I sent hugs,” Angelus added.

Wesley pointed at the vampire. “He’s right there.”

Giles sat up, reaching into the bag by his bed, took out a bottle of holy water and threw it at Angelus. It passed straight through him and the open doorway and smashed against the bed as Angelus vanished into thin air – just as Gunn jolted into wakefulness, shouting, “The hell…?”

“Just stay where you are,” Giles told him calmly. “I’ll come and clear up the glass in a minute.” He took Wesley’s arm and sat him down on the sofa. “Sit there and as soon as I’ve picked up the glass I’ll get us both a cup of tea – or perhaps a stiff drink.”

“Did you see him?” Wesley asked desperately.

“No, Wesley.” Giles squeezed his shoulder. “I didn’t see him.”

Willow came out of her room, blearily rubbing her eyes. “I heard shouting and crashing.”

“Wesley had a bad dream.” Giles gazed into his eyes and Wesley was surprised by how kind they seemed. Giles never looked quite the way he remembered him being whenever he got him in focus. 

“Am I insane?” Wesley breathed.

There was an awkward pause before Giles found his voice again: “I’m not sure. I don’t think so. I think you may be having some kind of…breakdown brought on by the shock of being brought back from the dead and grief at having lost your friends. But I don’t think you’re actually insane.”

“I could be dangerous.” He looked down at his hands. “When I have breakdowns I usually hurt people.”

Gunn limped out into the room, blood running from one foot; as if to prove that an insane Wesley had the power to lacerate him even from a distance.

“I told you to stay where you were,” Giles said in exasperation.

“Yeah, like that was going to happen.” Gunn crouched down next to Wesley. “What happened?”

“Angelus was here.”

“No, he wasn’t, cause – I would have noticed. You just had a bad dream.” Gunn squeezed Wesley’s shoulder gently. “A really bad dream.”

“He said you could die in so many ways and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

Gunn leaned forward and touched his head against Wesley’s so they could both feel the warmth of the other man’s skin. “I’m not dead and neither are you. And Angelus wasn’t here and, wherever he is right now, Angel isn’t Angelus. He could be a pile of dust or he could be on a mission for the Powers, but I will guarantee you he isn’t Angelus. But you’ve got to stop making everything about Angel – that’s not what our lives are about now.”

Wesley looked down at his wrist, the one Angelus had grabbed that had hurt so much while he was twisting it, upon which there was no sign of a bruise. “I’m obviously delusional. I could be dangerous.”

“You’re not dangerous.” Gunn’s breath tickled his face. “You’re just confused and really, really unhappy. But things are going to get better.”

“That’s what I told Cordelia.” Even though he was probably either dead or insane and Gunn was probably a hallucination, Wesley leant into the comforting warmth of him. “It was a lie then, too.”

In the background he could hear the tinkle of glass as Giles swept the remnants of the bottle of holy water into the dustpan. Willow sat on the arm of the sofa and patted Wesley gently on the back. He could feel her fingers touching him and he could feel Gunn’s breath against his cheek, his arm around him. If he listened very hard he could probably hear his heartbeat too. And they all sounded and felt and smelt exactly as real as Angelus had been when he had been sitting a foot from him on the bed with his fingers wrapped around his throat.

***

Wedged into the corner of his sofabed by the sleeping bodies of his three companions, Giles sighed and hoped he would eventually get some feeling back in his left arm. It was clear that the friendly hallucinations with which Wesley had been saying goodbye to his past life had turned against him with a vengeance tonight. He imagined that there were very few people on the planet that disliked Wesley enough to unleash a soulless sadist like Angelus upon him, but unfortunately, Wesley was apparently one of them. 

He had given Wesley a sedative and a dash of very good scotch, but the man hadn’t wanted to go back to his room, which was why Giles was now having to sit upright at three in the morning while Gunn snored gently next to him, and Wesley slept with his head on Gunn’s chest and Willow’s head on Wesley’s shoulder, her fingers intertwined with his. Giles was glad that they could sleep in such uncomfortable positions but there was no possible chance of him being able to doze off like this.

Before Gunn drifted off to sleep, Giles had managed a brief conversation with him. The sedative had kicked in and Wesley had already been asleep, while Willow had drifted off halfway through a drowsy assurance to them both that everything would look better in the morning. Gunn looked down at his bandaged foot. “Why did you throw a bottle of holy water at a hallucination anyway?”

“I presume Wesley’s hallucinations have to conform to some kind of internal logic and it needed to be something that would get rid of a vampire. I’m not a psychiatrist, but I’d say that on top of the trauma of being brought back from the dead, and the grief of having lost so many people that mattered to him, Wesley has a really bad case of survivor guilt.”

Gunn gently stroked Wesley’s hair. “You know, he used to be a pretty well-adjusted guy. This isn’t who he is. This is just… He’s not this guy.”

“Well, his capacity for self-loathing seems unchanged.”

“Wes could always beat himself up better than anyone else. But wishing Angelus on himself – that’s all kinds of fucked up.” 

“You don’t need me to tell you how serious a development this is. If in Wesley’s mind his…delusions can talk to him and touch him and one of his delusions is now a soulless serial killer with an infinite capacity for sadistic and inventive cruelty Wesley is in serious danger.”

Gunn rested his head on the back of the sofabed. “I know. That shaman guy got Angel to lose his soul by putting a lot of pictures in his head that seemed real to him. The images weren’t real but Angel lost his soul for real in the real world. If Wesley thinks he can’t breathe because Angelus is choking him again, he’s still going to wake up dead…”

Now, as Gunn snored quietly beside him, Giles thought of Jenny lying on the bed with her neck broken; Buffy missing after the trauma of her battle with Angelus. He almost wished Angelus had been real, as staking him was looking pretty good right now. His To Do list seemed to be getting longer and longer. He was still focused on finding Alicia’s murder or murderers but he also needed to know what magic was being formulated that left no traceable impression and was of such power it could withstand even the most reliable spells; there was the small matter of trying to save any other witches who might be out there and in danger; investigating what he suspected was an area of mystical convergence under that bookshop in Knaresborough, and preventing Wesley’s delusions from torturing or killing him.

He looked at the whisky bottle and his glass with that faint remaining wash of amber stickiness, but as he was meant to be keeping a clear head rather than drowning his sorrows, he supposed he should resist its lure. Sighing, he snagged the nearest book within reach instead. It was the rather revolting old volume that Wesley had bought in the bookshop, and he turned the pages gingerly. It was badly foxed and smelt musty, and there was something singularly unpleasant about the cracked hide in which it had been bound. He suspected it was pigskin but his fingers prickled with distaste when they touched it. There were several places with blank paper, half a page or a whole page, or in one case a whole chapter – a printing fault presumably, which might have made the book unique or valuable if it had not been in such deplorable condition. Of the spells that remained, they were all dark magic of the nastiest kind and involving the sacrifice of live animals, but none involved the blood of witches, and he could find no real reason for Wesley’s fascination with it. 

He did wish he could remember what the options had been when he had taken his lessons with Mrs Taschen all those years ago. Now he thought about it, he remembered having to sit with Crispin Huxley during those lessons, who was of the same priggish nature as Wesley had evidently been in his young day, and who had kept his work covered with a defensive elbow the entire time, in case Giles had tried to copy it. That was because Ben Parslow had been taking another class. There had been some folderol associated with it. Ben hadn’t been able to attend a couple of other classes that came up in later years as well and Giles had always missed him – especially when it meant he had to sit next to prats like Crispin. The Academy had been like that, though, riven with secrets and cliques; the teachers much more interested in fostering rivalry than amity; half the time Giles had thought the specialsekrit classes had no purpose other than to incite paranoia in the ones who didn’t attend. The whole world had been intensely competitive, claustrophobic and divorced from the realities of the outside world. He had never known so many socially maladjusted virgins or such a number of pushy demanding parents, always wanting to sign up their hapless offspring for more and yet more classes. Those students that weren’t orphans, of course. Sons of Watchers were often orphans. Giles, like Wesley, after him, had been fortunate in having two living parents. Although perhaps ‘fortunate’ was not the word in Wesley’s case.

“Giles…?” 

He turned his head and found Wesley gazing at him blearily.

“You’re supposed to be asleep,” Giles told him, not unkindly. 

“I don’t like my dreams.”

“Just…think happy thoughts, Wesley, there’s a good chap.”

“Every woman I’ve ever loved is dead, Giles. The happy thoughts are in slightly short supply.”

That did at least sound more like Wesley. Giles reached out for the whisky bottle, undid the top and handed it over wordlessly. Wesley took it from him, and drank deeply before nodding his thanks. “Thank you.”

“Do you want to see a psychiatrist?”

Wesley looked indescribably weary. “I think any psychiatrist worth his salt would commit me, don’t you?”

“I rather think he or she would.” Giles tried to see the man he had known so briefly in this wrecked remnant. “Wesley, do you understand that Angelus wasn’t really here?”

“Yes.” Seeing Giles’ surprise, Wesley shrugged. “If Angelus had really been here, he would have killed Gunn. I would have woken up next to his cooling corpse. That’s his way.”

Again, Giles remembered Jenny’s open stare. No one should be that beautiful in death. “Yes, it is. His way – I mean. Do you still think you may be in hell?”

“I have no idea where I am.” Wesley took another swig from the whisky bottle. “If I try to remember something it becomes real, all the possibilities, the fantasies, they solidify in my memory. I don’t seem to have any facility for separating my real past or present from all possible pasts or presents any more. I wanted Cordelia to come and visit me so much after I…took Connor that I have a memory of her doing so. There is only one part of my mind still capable of telling me that she never did, and I think it’s fading…” He glanced up at Giles. “I imagine I’m rather trying to live with at the moment?”

Giles half-smiled. “Just a little, yes.”

Wesley smirked. “No change there, then.”

“I want to help,” Giles told him gently. “I just don’t know how.”

“Well, either I’m dead, and none of you are real anyway, in which case I imagine your usefulness is limited, or I’m seriously mentally disturbed in which case…I don’t know what to do. I’m so tired, Giles.”

“I know.” He reached across Gunn to pat Wesley’s shoulder. “I do understand that this must be very confusing for you, but I don’t think you’re going to get better until you forgive yourself.”

“For what?” 

Giles thought again how appalling he looked with those coal black shadows under his eyes. “I don’t know what you think you need to be punished for. Taking Connor, perhaps.”

“I’m over that.” Wesley took another swig of whisky.

“Are you really?” Giles gazed at him levelly. “Or do you think it’s your fault that you all ended up in Wolfram & Hart? Or are you afraid that if you stop blaming yourself you may have to start blaming Angel? He chose Connor over the rest of you. Chose the child who betrayed him and would have betrayed the world over those of you who loved him and believed in him. You shed your blood for him and in the end, what did he do for any of you?”

“He gave us purpose and direction and a family and a life we would never have had without him.” For once, Wesley didn’t sound defensive. He was gazing at the cracked glass of the picture on the wall. “He didn’t owe us anything. And we were supposed to help the helpless – that included Connor. He was a very damaged boy.”

“Thanks to you?”

“Yes,” Wesley answered unflinchingly. “Thanks to me.”

“Do you blame Cordelia for believing in Skip? For letting him demonize her in the first place? For ascending and letting Jasmine take over her body?”

“No. I’ve never blamed her. I told her it wasn’t her fault – I hope she believed me. She couldn’t have known. How could she have known? She was trying to do the right thing.”

“So were you.” Giles leaned forward. “Wesley, if you don’t forgive yourself for whatever part you think you played in recent events, I think you’re going to end up in a padded cell or as a nasty stain on the pavement. Angelus can’t come back unless you issue an invitation. Don’t invite him in. Find another way to say goodbye to the people you love that doesn’t involve punishing yourself for real or imaginary errors of judgement and move on. Come back to the real world. Quite apart from the fact that you would be very useful to Willow and me, I think Gunn really needs you.”

Wesley handed back the bottle. “I don’t know how – to get back. Is there some kind of map? There don’t seem to be any directions from where I am. Half the people I talk to every day aren’t there and I don’t know which ones are which and I’m so tired of…feeling like this.”

Giles took the bottle from him. “You have to give it time, Wesley. I know it’s a maddening cliché, but it’s also the truth. You’ve been leading a ridiculously stressful life for years now, and have lost three friends in the space of a few months – you were probably due a breakdown even without being brought back from the dead.”

“Six friends.” Wesley was already looking at the whisky bottle as if it might hold the answer to all his problems. “We lost Illyria, Lorne, and Spike as well as Fred, Cordelia, and Angel.”

“I don’t think Lorne’s dead. Willow saw much of what happened and she said he walked out of his assignment alive. He just needed some time by himself to recover. And after what Illyria did to Fred I wouldn’t have thought you would have cared if…”

“It wasn’t her fault.” Wesley looked so exhausted that even talking seemed to require a great effort. “She infected Fred without malice. It was just her means of coming back to life. She was learning new things – getting to grip with her feelings. And at the end, she showed me human compassion. I miss her as a complete and separate entity from Fred. I miss them in very different ways and with very different levels of intensity, but I do miss them both.”

“And Spike?” Giles demanded in disbelief.

Wesley half-smiled. “He was kind to us, and he gave up a chance to be corporeal to save Fred. I’ll always be grateful to him for that. And when he thought Angel had lost his soul he put himself between what he believed to be Angelus and the rest of us. I hope he died a hero and found some reward or else was saved. He didn’t deserve to be dust.”

“You have so much compassion for everyone but yourself, Wesley,” Giles said wearily.

“Actually, I don’t.” Wesley seemed almost amused by the idea. “I’m not a particularly compassionate man. But I believe in justice. Spike was fighting a fight that didn’t threaten him, when he could have walked away unscathed, just because he thought it was the right thing to do. That ought to count for something.”

Giles twisted around in his place on the sofa, having to wriggle his arm out from under Gunn’s weight to do so. He poured himself a glass of whisky and drank it down, needing that familiar fiery burn on his tongue. “And what about you? How many times could you have walked away? The Council fired you. You had no further obligation to the cause, but you went on fighting demons anyway. Angel fired you, and you still kept trying to save others at great personal risk to yourself. Angel cast you out and you saved him and kept fighting the good fight. You’re allowed to make a mistake. Everyone is entitled to do that. You didn’t act cruelly or unjustly or to line your own pockets or to gain power for yourself. You did something you believed to be right and the consequences were…disastrous. Well, you’re not the first and you won’t be the last. Angel walked into a dark alley with a pretty woman and he walked out of it a monster, but he was still entitled to forgiveness. When he lost his soul and killed…killed Jenny, it wasn’t his fault, and he was entitled to forgiveness. So are you. Find a way to forgive yourself. There are people who need you to be sane again and I don’t think that’s going to happen until you acknowledge your right to…fuck up.”

Wesley gazed at him wearily. “Have you forgiven yourself for your mistakes? Has Willow forgiven herself for hers?”

Somewhat exasperated, Giles said: “Well, we’re not talking to dead people, Wesley, so I think that puts us at least one up on you.”

To his surprise, Wesley smiled and reached across him for the whisky bottle. He clanked it against Giles’s glass with a smirk. “Touché…”

***

The crystals were displayed on white gravel, rough-cut glitterings of rock. Willow had noticed the shop when she had been returning from her visit to the Wicca group and had made a mental note to go in and take a look around. Listening to Giles and Wesley talk the previous evening had given her the incentive to come back today. While pretending to be asleep, she had heard most of their conversation and had woken up this morning with a badly cricked neck and a renewed determination to try to help Wesley grope his way back to life. Gunn had woken up a minute after her, Wesley fast asleep and wedged in between them, too deeply asleep to move even though, as Gunn told her, he really needed to pee, and she really wanted a nice hot cup of tea. They’d conversed in whispers, a pre-dawn exchange of confidences from one barely conscious person to the other, and she’d understood a little better why Giles could be gentle to Wesley when there were no witnesses, because she very much doubted that Gunn would have bared his soul to her so much if he’d been fully awake or if anyone else had been listening.

She had already visited the pet store and paid for the goldfish tank and white gravel. Now she was having to choose the crystals, and it was so much more difficult than she had expected. The ones for herself had been easier. That piece of amber was the only possibility. The soft red-gold glow of it soothed her at once. She hardly needed to look at the card on which had been neatly inscribed: ‘activates altruistic nature; realization of the spiritual intellect’; it was just the right choice, and she knew it as soon as she saw it. The deep purple amethyst seemed to call to her as well, but the third choice was difficult. It had to be something that was expensive – she would have liked that – but beautiful as well. In the end a thin thread of gold embedded in white quartz was aesthetically pleasing and had a suitably impressive price tag to be the obvious choice. 

Now – on to the others. The black tourmaline was easy, that faint sheen of purple under the surface of the blackness, the way it reflected light, colour within the darkness; like a soul trapped within a shadow. The vivid blueness of the Lapis was an easy choice as well. But she dithered for a while between yellow Jasper, carnotite, and a particularly bright chunk of crystallized sulphur before settling on the latter. She needed a red the colour of heart and courage and life itself; something so vivid it felt as if were still alive a year after it had left only memories behind. The crocoite was spectacular, so many thin threads of brilliant scarlet, and the garnets were hard to ignore, but in the end there was nothing to touch that perfect cluster of vanadinite crystals. The chrysocolla wasn’t the right shade of green, nor was the elbaite or aquamarine; she hesitated over a particularly fine olivine crystal but then chose a polished piece of banded malachite. It drew the eye, inviting it to look deeper and deeper. 

The last one was hardest of all. She had picked up a beautiful piece of rose quartz when her eye was caught by rounded piece of dark glassy rock. It cost twice as much as any of the other crystals, but the hand-written card said: ‘Tektite from Texas. Once believed to be extra-terrestrial in origin, Tektites are still poorly understood. Their chemistry is unique and somewhat unexplained. They have no crystal structure and their odd and diverse chemistry is a matter of confusion for scientists who are still debating their origins.’ A beautiful scientific anomaly from Texas which might or might not have once visited an alien world. Willow pointed to the rock with a slightly trembling finger. “That one, please.”

The woman behind the counter looked at Willow’s rather shabby coat and scuffed shoes sceptically but did take out the tektite. Willow pointed to the other crystals she had chosen in quick succession, no doubts now, knowing these were the right choices. The woman hesitated over the sulphur. “This is a little garish. We have a softer yellow than this.”

“No, it needs to be bright.” He had never been about being tasteful and decorative; much more about making a loud statement. He would want to be remembered the same way.

The woman seemed unwilling to give up the black tourmaline. “This is one of the best crystals of this colour we’ve had in.”

“Yes, it’s beautiful.” _Give it to me._

Reluctantly the woman finished wrapping them all in tissue paper and then bubblewrap and putting them in a cardboard box. Willow handed over her credit card. The Watchers’ Council that had always been too cheap to pay Buffy in the past, despite knowing she was the only Slayer and was going out every night and risking her neck for the greater good while trying to raise a motherless younger sister, both of which tended to cut into one’s ability to get an education or a well-paid job, were eager to pay any survivors now. It wasn’t a lot, but she had told her father she was doing a PhD in England and he had given her money towards that as well, so she could afford to be very extravagant just this once. It was true that she hadn’t admitted her PhD would be in witchcraft and that her studies would never be recognized by any actual university but she was studying so that, at least, was real. She thought Tara would have approved of what she was trying here today; not just going for the cleansing spell or the memory restoration spell; trying to find another way of reaching out to another human being that didn’t involve any use of magic.

The woman behind the counter gave Willow a rather belated ‘Blessed be’ when her credit card went through the system and Willow gave her a nice smile in return. With her box of crystals safe in her bag, she was feeling benevolent even towards people who were dismissive of others who wore scuffed shoes.

Her good mood lasted halfway to the bus stop when her cellphone rang. She assumed it would be Giles, asking her to pick up supplies, and she ready to tell him she was way ahead of him with the toilet paper already in her shopping bag; but the voice on the phone was female and sounded choked with tears. 

“Ms Rosenberg?”

“Yes. What’s wrong?”

“It’s Rosemary.”

For a moment the name meant nothing and then she remembered the wind chimes and the fleeting clouds scudding across the rippling birdbath. “From the Wicca group? Oh, how are you?”

“Not very… You told me to call you if… I’ve just heard that… Mary’s dead.”

Willow stopped and felt the world rushing around her; passers-by smearing and blurring; while in her mind’s eye she saw a flayed corpse, all that power surging through her that had helped no one now. “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you. It’s been… it’s a terrible shock. She was murdered.”

“Because she was a witch.” Willow didn’t even phrase it as a question. Of course, because she was a witch. That was why Mary had felt so guilty, because she could have helped and she hadn’t, and now she was dead.

“People came and… They killed her.” 

Willow could hear the woman’s voice trembling with fear. “Where did they kill her?”

“On Brimham Moors.”

She felt a flare of guilt and anger, asking for more details and receiving the little that Rosemary knew, all of it horrible – the woman tied up and her blood drained before her body had been set on fire. “I’m so sorry. We are going to stop these people, I promise. Please, if you remember anything or learn anything else – call me at once.” As she switched off the phone she knew why her spells hadn’t worked – because she was so afraid of the dark magic surging through her and taking her over, so afraid of becoming what she had been in the past, that she was failing to do her job. 

_You’ve done everything humanly possible._

That was the problem. She’d done as much as Willow could do without accessing all the darkness inside her. Done as much as a human could do, but not as much as a witch could do. 

Everything felt clearer suddenly; sharpened into painful focus; another death on her conscience because she was too pathetic and scared of becoming evil to do any good. She thought of Giles, Gunn, and Wesley and they seemed so breakable; no wonder she hadn’t wanted to unleash everything that she could be around them. They weren’t vengeance demons or Slayers, just fragile humans whose bones would snap if she became a whirlwind. 

This time she forced herself to welcome the memories of what she had been; having all that power flowing through her; more power than any other witch or demon to walk the earth. Whoever these murderers were, they could not be stronger than her; they were not the ones preventing her from finding them – she was doing that herself; cravenly holding back out of a fear of the darkness inside her. Now she needed to let the darkness out. But she needed to do it by herself, where there was no fear of hurting anyone she cared for.

She walked back to the teashop and smiled brightly at Judith, telling her they would soon be down for lunch and that she would like the quiche and salad, please. When she reached the apartment, Giles gave her a smile of welcome. “A fish tank arrived for you, Willow.”

“Are we having fish?” Wesley looked up from his disgusting old book with interest. “Coldwater or tropical?”

“Neither.” She slipped the box from her bag and placed it on the bookshelf where it wouldn’t attract too much attention. “I just want the tank and the gravel.”

Wesley looked disappointed. “I was always quite good with guppies.”

“I believe it’s traditional for villains to have marine fish,” Giles mused. “Although I’ve personally always found those rather drab for the work involved. Give me a neon tetra any day.”

“They don’t breed those,” Wesley assured him. “They capture them in the wild and kill thousands in the process.”

“Really? I never knew that. What a shame. I’ve always liked neon tetras.”

“We’re not having any fish,” Willow repeated more loudly. 

Gunn looked up from cleaning a crossbow that she couldn’t imagine he had managed to get past Customs. Presumably it was one of Giles’. “Is it still a ‘no’ on the dog?”

“We’re not having a dog,” Giles said in some exasperation. “Or a cat before you ask, Wesley.”

“I didn’t say I wanted a cat. I just pointed out that Willow is a witch. Traditionally, she should have a cat.”

“Well, leaving tradition out of it, the last cat Willow had was killed in an accident and everyone’s still very scarred by it. We’ve found that lethal weapons and pets don’t go very well together, not to mention pets and vampires.”

“Angelus killed my fish,” Willow explained.

Gunn shook his head. “Man, that was petty.”

Wesley still seemed to be following his own train of thought. “Or a toad. There should definitely be a familiar of some kind.”

“I don’t want a pet toad.” Willow could feel her head beginning to throb and she had only been back in the apartment for a few minutes. “I don’t want a familiar. Or a broomstick. Or a black pointy hat. I just want lunch.”

Giles looked at her curiously. “Is there something wrong?”

“No, it’s just that…” She couldn’t find the words for how unconducive to clarity they were. Outside, by herself, her mind had been so focused and clear, and now everything was muddled again. They all talked at once and about different things, and she was trying to concentrate. “I can’t think with you all making so much noise.”

They exchanged apologetic grimaces and started tip-toeing around talking in whispers in a way that was even more distracting than them being noisy. “I’m having lunch.” She picked up the magic book she wanted and stomped back downstairs, thinking longingly of Tara, Xander and Buffy – people with whom she could be quiet and reflective. As she took her place at the table Judith was keeping permanently reserved for them, it occurred to her that the most sensible conversation she’d had with anyone in weeks had been that phone call with Faith.

***

The print on the wall, with its starring of cracked glass, had turned from pale blue to crimson, the frame gilded and burnished with reflected redness mirrored in from the open bathroom. Giles had been staring at the effect for a full minute while thinking of other things before he got it into focus and realized that the sun must be sinking. He sat up and looked at his watch. “Isn’t Willow back yet?”

Wesley looked up from the book he was still studying and then carefully gazed all around the room. “I can’t see her.”

“Well, you failing to see her is hardly confirmation, Wesley, but rather more to the point neither can I.”

Gunn came out of the bathroom, wiping his newly-shaven head with a towel. “Wes sees people who aren’t here, not doesn’t see people who are.”

“How do we know?” Giles countered. 

Gunn pointed to himself. “Wes, can you see me?”

Wesley looked at him as if he suspected Gunn might have taken rather too many blows to head. “Yes.”

“Can you see Giles?”

Wesley solemnly looked at Giles. “Yes.”

Gunn shrugged. “There you go then.”

“Yes, let no one say that you lack in rigorous scientific procedure, Gunn.” Giles checked his watch again. “She’s been gone for six hours.”

“Maybe she wanted some female company.” Gunn sat down next to Giles and picked up a spell book curiously. “She’s probably pretty sick of hanging out with just a bunch of guys. Cordy used to get kind of tired of us sometimes.”

“You astonish me.”

Gunn was entirely unabashed. “Yeah, it astonished us too. You got a set of Risk around here?”

Wesley looked up with interest. “I remember playing Risk with you.”

“Do you remember that I always used to kick your skinny white ass?”

There was a pause before Wesley bent back to his book, murmuring provocatively: “No, I have no memory of that at all.”

Gunn’s grin at this show of near normality made Giles hide a smile of his own. “Cup of tea, Wesley?”

“You have to make it in the pot,” Gunn told him, starting to get to his feet. “Maybe I should…?”

“Yes, thank you, Gunn, I think, as an Englishman and a Watcher, I may actually be capable of making a palatable cup of tea.”

He presumed that at some point Gunn was going to stop acting as if he were the only person who could take care of Wesley. Or perhaps not. Perhaps Gunn had always been like this and Wesley’s precarious state of sanity had nothing to do with it? When he carried over the tea and set it down by Wesley’s elbow, he looked over his shoulder at what he was writing. He appeared to be copying from an undoubtedly blank page in a form of script that he had never…no, wait, he had seen it once before a long time ago, when he and Ben Parslow had been doing their prep. Those strange sigils and symbols which Giles had taken to be a demonic script Ben was studying. 

_“Is that some language I should be studying to be able to incant for myself the limitless wealth and all those loose women you and I keep hoping for?”_

_“Alas, no, Rupert, old son. It’s just a boring old transliteration code. For transcribing invisible script so that we soon to be old farts can read it.”_

_“How can you see it to transcribe it?”_

_“It’s not invisible to me. Only to….”_

Giles gasped as the memory hit him and the realization of what Wesley had been able to comprehend but not to explain. “Witches. It was a way of transcribing spells invisible to witches into a code that only the Watchers’ Council could understand.”

Gunn looked up at his face in some surprise. “What’s that? And, man, you’ve gone whiter than usual. You want to sit down before you fall down?”

Ignoring him, Giles dug his fingers into Wesley’s shoulder a little harder than was strictly necessary. “Wesley, those lessons you took with Professor Brewer. Tell me about them?”

Wesley gazed up at him for an endless moment while Giles had to resist the urge to shake him so hard his teeth rattled. 

“Wesley!” he snapped out in as good an imitation as he could manage of Roger Wyndam-Pryce. “The lessons you took with Professor Brewer. I need to know what they were and I need to know now.”

And apparently that was the right approach. Wesley’s face cleared as one of his long lost or temporarily mislaid memories presumably made it back to the forefront of his mind. Wesley put down his pen and went into what seemed to be automatic learning-by-rote mode. “They were specialist classes for training in ways to deal with some of the old death cults. In the past there were a number of demon-raising sorcerers whose powers could only be held in check by the intervention of witches. The two maintained a balance, the sorcerers prevented the witches raising demons sympathetic to their aims and the witches prevented the sorcerers from doing the same. Then a splinter group of sorcerers formulated a particular kind of spell-casting that was impervious to witchcraft, upsetting the balance. The Watchers’ Council had been neutral before, but, once there were several acts of demon raising that should have been prevented by witches and weren’t, they were forced to intervene, and captured and tortured several of the Sect of Carmencaecus, making them give up their spell books. They discovered that those of the Watchers’ Council who were versed in the study of witchcraft could not read the spells nor efficiently detect them because their original construction had been made from a spell involving the blood of witches…Oh…” Wesley came out of head boy mode to the present and his face cleared. “I knew there was something about the blood of witches that was important.”

Still gripping him by the shoulders, Giles ground out: “Wesley, are you saying the book you bought in Knaresborough contains these…invisible spells?”

Wesley nodded. “Yes. It’s a very rare grimoire. The Watchers’ Council tried to obtain every copy, but they must have missed this one. It’s not a Sect of Carmencaecus book, it’s one by Matthew of Chichester, who was an early Watcher who had it published privately – Spells And Counterspells Of The Secret Sorcerers And An Exposure Of the Invisible Texts. There was a copy in the library at the Academy but it was in much better condition than this one.”

Giles actually did shake him then, a vicious little jolt that in no way relieved the ferment of his feelings – he would probably have had to hurl Wesley out of a window for that. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I couldn’t remember all of it then.”

Gunn had risen to his feet and was giving Giles a look of accusation. “So, when you said that Wesley was just seeing things that aren’t there…?”

“He was actually seeing things that are there but are hidden.” He ran a hand through his hair, wondering if it was possible to physically explode from frustration. “Wesley, if you had only…”

“Maybe you didn’t ask him the right questions,” Gunn retorted. “Or any questions. Too busy telling him he was nuts.”

“He is nuts,” Giles retorted sharply. “Even he admits that. This text – these spells – they’re something I barely read about at the Academy but they are as a I recall a specially devised spell-script designed to be invisible to witches.” It was growing dark and he leaned across to switch on the lamp.

Wesley nodded. “Yes – who can neither read them nor detect them when the spells are cast, and have no means to combat them. Ironically, given that their primary use is the raising of demons, the clergy helped them to formulate them, considering witches a greater threat than sorcerers.” Back on the safe ground of regurgitating book knowledge learned by rote in some distant simpler past when his life revolved around getting an ‘A’ for each essay, Wesley seemed considerably happier.

Gunn was peering at the sigils Wesley had so carefully transcribed but talking to Giles: “So, you’re not a witch, why can’t you see them?”

“I studied witchcraft. It’s far and away the easiest method of learning how to perform the spells necessary for being a Watcher. Learning magic while avoiding learning witchcraft is like getting from London to Paris via Reykjavik and Sydney – incredibly complicated and difficult, and unnecessarily so, given that the Sect of Carmencaecus are a minor footnote in the history of sorcery. The Watchers’ Council must traditionally inflict this method of learning on a few boys in each year so that the spells and the spell-decoding text aren’t forgotten, but I imagine that no one in centuries would have had any cause to use them as the Sect were believed to have become extinct in the seventeenth century.”

Wesley gazed at him. “Like the Eliminati.”

“And like vampires don’t exist, they’re just something you see in the movies,” Gunn added.

“I also had the power of the coven lent to me so that Willow could take it from me, so, even if I hadn’t been contaminated by my studies, I was certainly drenched in all manner of very powerful witchcraft then.” He grabbed a chair and sat down next to the other Englishman. “Wesley, you need to tell me what you’ve learned. Are there any spells in your book that use the blood of witches?”

Gunn rubbed a hand across his forehead. “So, Wes was right all the time and those women were killed for their blood?”

“I’ve no idea,” Giles told him tersely. “They could have been killed because they were a threat or because of old enmities. All I know about the Sect of Carmencaecus is that they were rumoured to be undetectable by witchcraft and impervious to all spells cast by witchcraft. They can only be countered by other means.”

“These other means being…?”

“Completely unknown to me,” Giles snapped at him.

Wesley gazed at him solemnly. “And by all witches. Many of the witchfinders of old were members of the Sect of Carmencaecus – that was how they could capture the witches in the first place, and why they couldn’t get free once they were captured. Then under cover of torturing those poor women to make them confess, the witchfinder could take as much of their blood as he needed to maintain the spells to keep them confined, then gather up their charred bones and ashes afterwards – a vital component for many of the Sect’s most powerful spells. There were a lot of more of them on the continent. They were quite rare in this country. There’s a fascinating account by Francis of – ” 

“The spells, Wesley…? What spells demand the blood of witches?”

He reached for his notebook, the same notebook in which he had been diligently transcribing what Giles had taken to be absolute gibberish for days, and began to look through it with what seemed to be deliberate slowness.

“Wesley…?”

“Some of them. I’m looking. Wait…” He sounded plaintive as a schoolboy and Giles belatedly remembered all those notes on Wesley’s personal file about him not doing well under pressure, particularly from male authority figures. Thinking of Alicia, he decided to suck up his impatience and wait.

The phone made them all jump and Giles snatched at it, almost relieved to have something to do that didn’t involve pacing up and down or possibly smacking Wesley – then himself – very hard, because, yes, if he were honest, he was far angrier with himself then he was with Wesley. Wesley at least had the excuse of being mentally unhinged from being brought back from the dead and quite possibly in the middle of a complete nervous breakdown; Giles only had the excuse of having always found Wesley trying in the past.

“Rupert Giles,” he said tersely, hoping it was Willow and ready and willing to scold her for being out for so long.

“Is Willow Rosenberg there?”

A woman’s voice, unfamiliar to him, and his heart sank. “No, I’m afraid she’s out at the moment. Can I take a message?”

“It’s Rosemary, we spoke earlier. Can you tell her that I had a call from Joanna, and she says that Mary borrowed a book from her on the day before the night when she was…killed… A spellcasting book.”

Giles felt as if someone had just run ice water through his veins. “Another witch was killed?”

“Well, Mary wasn’t a ‘witch’ as such. We just liked to discuss the history of witchcraft from the viewpoint of the empowerment of women, and the primal fear in men of women having power over their own identities and bodies and…”

“Was someone who had been studying witchcraft – in whatever capacity – murdered?”

“Yes, she was.” The tremor in the woman’s voice reminded him that this was also a grieving person he was addressing. “I told Willow that at noon. Haven’t you seen her since then?”

“I’m sorry – but it’s of great importance that you tell me absolutely everything that you know.” As she did so he was doing the maths in his head. Willow had received the call from this woman before she had come back here for lunch, yet she hadn’t said a word to them about anything. She had just talked about fish and then collected a few things from her room before having lunch with them downstairs and then saying she needed to visit a few of the wicca group.

“Could you give me the numbers of everyone in your group? I need to know if Willow is with them.”

“I don’t think I can do that. They don’t know you and I can’t just give out their numbers to… But I can call them myself and then call you back.”

“Fine, do that, please.” He gave her the number for his cellphone and when Gunn held up his, Gunn’s as well, just in case they had to go out. Asking her to tell him again on what part of the moors her friend had been murdered, Giles covered the phone and nodded to Gunn, saying sotto voce: “See if Willow left us a note of some kind in her room…” He made rapid notes as the woman told him about the spell book the dead woman had borrowed, what the police had said about the crime scene – Giles noticed with passing interest that the same policeman mentioned by Beth in Knaresborough seemed to be investigating this crime too, showing they were certainly connecting the murders – and more about Karin and Dora’s reputations as supposed practitioners in witchcraft and how they had always insisted Mary had the ‘power’ too, although Mary had always denied it.

As he put the phone down, Gunn shoved a note under his nose written in Willow’s unmistakable handwriting:

_Giles, don’t be mad, but I think I’m the reason the spells aren’t working. I’m afraid of letting go and going all…dark and veiny again. I need to do this myself in the open where I can’t accidentally hurt anyone else. If these guys can pick up witchy power then they should pick up my spell and try to find me, and then it’s a case of using control, right, and not killing them, however much I want to…._

There was more, but he didn’t bother reading it, leaping to his feet to exclaim passionately: “That idiotic girl!”

“Willow’s in trouble, right?” Gunn was already picking up Wesley’s coat and his own.

“She’s in terrible danger. She’s going to attempt to attract the attention of sorcerers against whom her spells will be entirely useless and against whom she will be entirely defenceless.”

“Yep, I’d call that trouble.” Gunn tossed Wesley his coat, and picked up an axe.

Giles pointed to the weapons bag. “We can’t walk to the car park carrying an array of mediaeval weaponry, Gunn, put it out of sight. Wesley…” He tried not to bark at him but given the way Wesley jumped nervously to his feet had evidently not succeeded very well. “Wesley, I need you to bring that book and all your notes. We need a counter-spell for whatever spell these people are attempting to cast. And we also need a way of incapacitating them so we can rescue Willow. Can you do that?” 

Wesley was already pulling on the coat that Gunn had thrown him. He looked as nervous as a student on the day of an examination but nodded purposefully. “Yes.”

Giles tried for a smile. “Good man.” Then he was grabbing for the bag in which he and Willow kept the magical ingredients and heading for the door, every instinct he possessed screaming at him that if he wasted even a second he was going to lose Willow the way he had lost Alicia. 

Gunn opened the door for him and slapped him briefly on the shoulder. “We’re going to get her back.” Giles thought how much more reassuring those words would have been from Buffy instead of a man who had already lost Cordelia and Fred. Then Gunn was clattering down the stairs, the bag of swords, axes and crossbows swinging from his shoulder as if they were as innocuous as golf clubs. 

As Wesley followed Gunn, leaving Giles to shut the door behind them, Giles saw his notebook and the spell book were both clutched in his hands, the breeze from the teashop door that Gunn had already opened, fluttering the pages. Giles looked at the black on white shimmer of pages of meticulously transcribed symbols and spells he had been dismissing for days and hoped to God that, however many hallucinations he might be communing with on a regular basis, the research part of Wesley’s brain was still working, because without Wesley, Willow was going to be dead before morning.

***

The air of the moors caught in her chest a little, all tangled up with bracken and gorse and skeins of cold cloud that lent an edge to the summer here, the way death was always a half-step beside life. After so many years living on a Hellmouth, Willow had expected to feel lighter and freer when she travelled to places that weren’t quite as saturated in dark magic. And, at first, she had felt it; the surprise of not feeling that heaviness in her bone marrow, like limestone-tainted water suddenly flowing through granite too hard to leave a trace. Then she had noticed that it wasn’t that there was the Hellmouth and then there was Everywhere Else, the one with its pull of dark magic, the other all clean and marrow-tugging free; there were just different veins of magic in different places. Some had shivered through the nerves, not painfully, just an undeniable sensation of the land reaching out and the magic in its bones threading itself through hers. Others were a faint or powerful feeling as one crossed a spine of magic embedded in rock or sand or turf; a connection to the land that she was aware of all the time. 

When she had returned to Sunnydale, in so much trepidation, after her first stay in England with Giles, she had been aware of the throb of the Hellmouth as never before. It was a bass beat under everything else, the bustle of traffic and chatter of voices, there it always was, this awakening beast with a heartbeat that tried to force everyone else’s life-force to pound in time to its. She wondered if the demons who came even knew why they were drawn there, if they just couldn’t resist its summoning, the beat of a rhythm their hearts no longer knew.

This land was different. There was ancient magic in the rock of this moorland, not the focused darkness of the Hellmouth, powerful but neutral, more like the current of water that could be used to boil broth or sear skin. The magic here felt silvery; very old and very pure, but more elusive than the cauldron bubble of the Hellmouth brew. But there was also the sense of something truly dark; a smell of burning flesh and hair carried on the breeze; something corrupt and evil spreading a rank stench over the wind-cleansed moor.

She wondered if Xander could feel a difference in Africa; if he had stayed there for so long because there was no magic, or else such a different kind of magic, that it was a rest cure in itself. She suspected he was in Africa because it was a place he had never been, with Anya or without her. It was typical of him not to bother the rest of them with his grieving. They had all shown him their scars over the years, bled on him, literally and metaphorically and expected him to bind up their emotional and psychic wounds, and he had done so, and been comforting, and stable, and the one of them who never turned into someone else; and when he had been in the most pain that he had ever known in his life, he had gone away so they wouldn’t be troubled with having to tend to him as he had always tended to them. She wished she could believe he had done that just because he needed to be by himself, but there was a part of her that wondered if he just thought they wouldn’t want to be bothered with him or his problems; as if he wasn’t somehow important enough to take up any of their time. If he still thought that after all these years then she and Buffy owed him all kinds of apologies for never telling him often enough how much he meant to them.

She could understand why Giles had never taken on the role of substitute father where Xander was concerned. He had not expected to find himself in that role with Buffy and yet had been forced into it by her clear need to have someone fulfilling that role in her life. Willow hadn’t intended to make him play that part for her either, and yet he had ended up doing so. There had probably been no time or energy left for Xander. Which wasn’t to say that Giles wasn’t fond of him, and wouldn’t have grieved for him painfully if he had died, but he had never really troubled to tell Xander how much he mattered to him, and Xander wasn’t the kind of person who would know without being told. Willow wondered if Giles really knew how it felt to be raised by parents who didn’t love you; what a big hole that left inside of you that perhaps no one else could ever fill.

When Xander came back – which she hoped would happen sooner rather than later because she was starting to miss him every day, as if the cord between them had been stretched too thin and was now becoming physically painful – she liked to think that he and Giles would interact as adults, and that Giles would treat Xander with the respect he deserved. She wasn’t sure though. Wesley was nearly eight years older than Xander, and had undergone the same kind of training as Giles, and Giles didn’t treat him like an adult or with a huge amount of respect. He had got into the habit of being exasperated by Wesley when he was in Sunnydale and he didn’t seem able to get out of it. She suspected a lot of Giles’s exasperation was a combination of guilt and anxiety. People who were unpredictable and didn’t – in his opinion – possess a lot of commonsense were variable factors whose impact on himself and others he couldn’t predict. One day she really was going to have to get Giles to admit that at heart he was something of a control freak. She had generally enjoyed unpredictability in others, as long as their unpredictability didn’t involve becoming possessed by hyaenas or losing their souls and killing people – but a little bit of spontaneity was no bad thing.

By contrast, she thought that Giles did respect Gunn, even after such a brief acquaintance. Even though he was younger than Wesley he seemed like more of an adult – as if his childhood had been so brief he barely remembered it; and he had been a grown up since puberty; whereas Wesley hadn’t really been a grown up even when he came to Sunnydale, when he must have been at least twenty-six. Gunn seemed so secure about who he was and how he’d gotten there. For the first time she wondered if that was really how Gunn felt – it certainly wasn’t how he’d described himself to her – or if it was a show he was putting on for Wesley; wanting to give the man something stable to anchor himself to, offering him a rope back to life if only Wesley would grab onto it. Gunn had told her that he thought he’d found himself in Wolfram & Hart, but all he’d really been doing was losing himself completely. 

Wesley, he said, acquired a new level of psychic scar tissue every year, another layer between himself and the world, another way of hiding who he really was. Wesley was an ever-evolving enigma even to his nearest and dearest. No one ever knew which way he was going to jump next, or if his next leap would be from the top of a roof. Wesley spent so much time pretending to be someone that he wasn’t that Gunn didn’t know if Wesley even knew who he was any more, but he thought that the guy he’d first met, the one who loved Angel and Cordelia, and trusted him, and was kind to Fred when she was crazy, and sought out Lorne because he had no problem with demons as long as they weren’t evil, and who saw the possibilities of someone who was anagogic before any of the rest of them; the guy who could send men to die if he thought it was the right thing to do, and then be as speechless at the miracle of a new baby as any child; he thought that guy was Wesley probably all the time underneath. That was the Wesley that Wesley tried to keep buried; that maybe, just maybe, Wesley had managed to keep intact deep inside of him. 

The other parts of Wesley, the hide he’d had to grow when life fucked him over too many times to face it without some more skin between himself and the next beating it was going to hand out, those aspects of Wesley Gunn didn’t love in the same way, but they were part of Wesley now, and he accepted them, too. Angel had unbalanced all of them when he’d taken away their memories, but Gunn had forgiven him, because, like Wesley’s kidnap of Connor, it had been a misguided act of love.

“Cause I think he did it for Wes as much as Connor, you know? Not just an extra way of keeping Connor safe by not having anyone else know about him, but because of the spell that went wrong where we weren’t guilty of anything any more, and the way Wes looked when he said he wouldn’t mind being like Cordelia was when she came back from a higher plane, and the way we all were when Jasmine took away our guilt and pain. But that was who we were – we were the people with those pasts and then we were someone else. It was confusing. Like having a migraine you could sense but not really feel – no pain, just…sensation. I thought it was the upgrade. But I still have that and the migraine went the moment I got my memories back. So, I don’t know who Wes would have been if he hadn’t had those memories taken away. I don’t know if Fred would have loved him if she’d remembered everything – but I think she would. I wasn’t angry with him for sniffing around a girl that wasn’t interested during that year. He was looking, sure, but she was looking back. I was angry with him so I wouldn’t have to deal with being angry with her, too, and I resented that she started moving away from me because of the darkness inside me that she hadn’t known was there and moving towards him because his darkness was more interesting than mine.”

Willow had looked at the sleeping Wesley, his head nestled on Gunn’s chest as if Gunn was the most secure thing in the world. “He doesn’t look very dark.”

“He’s just damaged. I don’t know how deep it goes. I don’t know if the core of him, the real him, if he’s been hurt too badly for him to ever be that guy again, or if he’s still in there and the damage is just scar tissue that didn’t get his heart.”

“What about you?” she’d asked him gently. “How damaged are you?”

Gunn had gazed at the way the light was coming in from their bedroom, the one they weren’t using tonight because of all needing to sleep on the couch so that Angelus wouldn’t come back, that first pearly early morning light that always made the day seem so full of promise. “I don’t know.”

There was nothing about Wesley he wasn’t willing to accept now, he’d told her, with a smile that didn’t get anywhere near his eyes, because Wes was the only thing he had left. The trouble was that while he knew he had Wesley, Wesley didn’t know he had him; so Wesley was lost without a compass or a friend right now, and Gunn wasn’t sure he was ever going to find his way back to shore.

Willow knew all about being so lost there was no way to find your way back. She hadn’t even wanted to get back. She’d wanted to be this strong and this separate; looking down on everyone who didn’t have her power – and that had been everyone in the world. 

Snatching a breath she looked at the sun sinking behind the rocks, the sky red and gold and almost too beautiful to bear. There had been a time when she hadn’t wanted there to be another sunset that Tara didn’t see; or sunrise, or full moon, or fall of rain or drift of cloud, or birdsong, or that catch of the heart as the leaves began to turn, and fall turned from green to gold and copper. She didn’t even want a joke told that Tara wasn’t alive to hear. It had been the clearest she had ever been about anything, that absolute clarity of wanting the world to end. She had never been as certain about anything else in her life – or so wrong. 

It was very difficult to come back from that brink and still have any self-confidence at all; even venturing an opinion felt presumptuous; something to which she simply wasn’t entitled. She knew that she had let Buffy down in that final year. They all had. Xander had been too gentle and she’d been too wrong before to push her opinion now, and Buffy had been cracking under a weight of responsibility that no one person should have had to bear alone. So, Willow knew no doubt was bad and too much doubt was bad, too, and trying to find the balance was so difficult sometimes that she wanted to have a time-out from life. But she had taken a life and that meant she had to save lives. She wasn’t sure what the ratio should be, perhaps Angel had known. But it felt as if you had to save an awful lot of lives to ever make up for taking one. Perhaps a ratio of a hundred to one was about right, or perhaps you never could pay back the complex miracle that was another human being. And perhaps Buffy and Giles would argue that by empowering the potentials she had already paid her dues, but they didn’t feel paid, she suspected they never would. She also wished she could have had a chance to talk to Angel about how you coped with the guilt and turned it into a positive forward action of doing good rather than turned it onto yourself and just went and gibbered in a corner somewhere.

But this felt like something she could do, and should do. Four women were dead. Four witches were dead. It should fall to a witch to avenge them and prevent any more loss of life. She could do this. Whatever other failings she might have, making with the dark magic mojo was something she could do, and this was the time and the place.

As the sun sank to a thin red line behind the rocks, black silhouettes against crimson, she sat cross-legged before the circle and began to conjure to the crone goddess Manat to let her see where the sorcerers were hiding; let her see them and them see her, and let them come together to fight a battle in her name…


	2. Chapter 2

***

##### 5: Brimham Rocks

A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same.  
Elbert Hubbard

Giles drove much too fast along roads he didn’t know, chasing the sinking sun. He had tried Willow’s cell phone but she had evidently switched it off. Rosemary called as they were a mile along the road to let him know what he already knew – that Willow wasn’t with any of the wicca group and none of them had seen her.

“Talk to me, Wesley,” he demanded. “What do you know?”

It seemed to be a relief for Wesley to go into researcher mode. He certainly made a lot more sense when in that state of mind than any other. “Twelve spells in this book that I’ve translated so far involve the blood of a witch or witches. I’ve been focusing my attention on spells that involve the blood of three witches – there are seven of those – and was trying to eliminate those through the positions of the planets when the spells must take place, but if there are now four witches dead, I need to look at the other spells I’ve translated.”

Wesley went back to his notes, crossing through things while Gunn tried to help. Bizarrely, once set a difficult task that needed to be carried out urgently in the back of a somewhat erratically-driven car, Wesley seemed to be far more in charge of his faculties. “Not the summoning of Anerethon, that only needs to bathe the sacrificial dagger in the blood of a mole, a gosling and the juice of the scarlet pimpernel before cutting a single witch’s throat and summoning him as her life blood ebbs… The seeking of the seven lost talismans of Garinos involves an invocation which involves witch sacrifice, but I think the blood of one witch or at the most two would be sufficient.”

“It has to need the blood of four witches. Stands to reason.” Gunn shrugged. “They’d have done their summoning by now if they had the ingredients, and a spell as nasty as this I’d say we’d know all about what it was they’d summoned. They must need all that blood.”

“And the ash of one,” Giles put in from the front. “The last one’s body was burned and a quantity of her ash and bone was taken away.”

“Well, this one uses ash and blood but…” There was a deathly hush as Giles watched Wesley paling in the rearview mirror.

“What?” he demanded.

“What’s the date?” Wesley asked abruptly. “Today? The date today?”

“June 10th, Wes,” Gunn supplied.

“‘Eleven nights before the summer solstice.’ And is the moon in Aries?”

Giles and Gunn exchanged a look and Giles reached for his cellphone. “I’ll find out.” He dialled the number for the Watchers’ Council office in London, hoping to find someone intelligent working there at this time of night. His heart sank when the voice on the other end of the phone was the self-important one of Andrew.

“You have reached the office of the Watchers’ Council of Great Britain. Andrew Wells speaking. Please state your password so that I may I assist you with your supernatural phenomenon…?”

“Andrew it’s Giles. I need to know where the moon is right now in relation to the other planets.”

“Wait…” There was the clatter of something being dropped and something else falling over and then a girlish scream which Giles surmised was caused either by the appearance of a spider or Andrew’s realization that the books in question were extremely heavy and somewhat precariously balanced on their shelves. 

“Hurry, man,” he snapped.

Wesley looked up to say: “Yes, because being shouted at when one is flustered and under pressure always makes one feel so much calmer.”

Remembering in time that he needed Wesley to read the spell, Giles swallowed his retort.

There was the sound of pages being rapidly turned, Andrew snatching up the phone to gasp breathlessly: “I’m looking. Wait…” And then another frantic rustle of pages before Andrew said: “The moon’s in Aries. Entered it today.”

“Ask him if Uranus is stationary,” Wesley demanded. “And if Mercury is waxing and Mars sesquiquadrate.”

“I doubt Andrew can even spell ‘sesquiquadrate’ let alone comprehend its meaning,” Giles muttered, but he passed on the questions tersely, and listened to Andrew frantically turning more pages before snatching up the phone once more.

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“All of those planets are doing all of those things today. Yesterday the moon was in Pisces and on Sunday it will be in Taurus, but today it’s in Aries. And do you need me to look up anything else? Because I can if you like?”

“It’s this spell.” Wesley met Giles’ eyes in the mirror. “And there’s a problem.”

“Yes, thank you, Andrew.” Giles put down the phone while the man was still burbling at him, and returned Wesley’s gaze. “What kind of a problem?”

“End of the world problem?” Gunn demanded.

“It’s a spell for the summoning of Narcoriel, a demon king of one of the darkest hell dimensions. That’s why the spell needs to be so powerful, because he won’t come easily. Once he’s here, he’ll want to combine this realm with his own by opening a doorway between the two. The members of the cult who worship him believe that his coming – and the destruction of mankind – is inevitable, but that they will be guaranteed a certain amount of protection from his wrath and that of his demon hordes by being his summoners.”

“Yep, that sounds like a problem,” Gunn admitted.

“Oh, that wasn’t the problem I was referring to,” Wesley glanced up briefly. “But I’m sure this is the spell. It’s the right date and the right time, and it will only work with the blood and ash of witches. But not just any witches. One must be ‘unknown by any man’ and one a seer, and one a novice, and one who ‘hides her powers beneath a cloak of shadow’.”

“According to Willow, Karin was a lesbian, which would presumably do as well as a virgin for the purpose of this spell, and Dora was supposed to be a seer, and Alicia would count as a novice, and the last woman who was murdered was not a practising witch as far as anyone knew, yet clearly possessed of power enough to attract the attention of these people.”

“So, they have everything they need for the spell and it’s the right day?” Gunn demanded in disbelief.

“No, it’s actually worse than that.” Wesley was still reading rapidly. “It doesn’t require the blood of four witches. It requires the blood of five. And the fifth must be ‘the murderer of a first born son’. It says ‘as her blood is steeped in blood so tenfold shall its powers be, and her ash shall open the gateway’. That’s what they need for the summoning. The rest is just ritual, sanctifying the place of summoning and making preparation for the casting of the spell. What they really need is…”

“Willow.” Giles’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “They need Willow.”

Wesley glanced up at him and Giles saw that he was sane, after all. As sane as any man would be who wasn’t sure if he was in the midst of a nightmare in which time and space and logic had no meaning and yet was required to interact with his surroundings as if they did. “I think they always did. I think that’s why they killed your god-daughter. I imagine that what Willow did – the power she possesses and how close she came to ending the world – would have attracted considerable attention from all manner of undesirable cults and sects. I very much fear that your god-daughter was…”

“Bait.” Giles knew that if he gripped the wheel any tighter it was going to shatter in his fingers. “They did it to bring me here, because they knew Willow would accompany me.”

“It’s not going to happen, man,” Gunn assured him. “We’re gonna find her and stop them.”

“No,” said Giles clearly. “We’re going to find them and kill them.”

“They could be human,” Wesley said quietly. “This demon, Narcoriel, is worshipped by both humans and demons.”

“I don’t care,” Giles assured him.

“But one day you will,” Wesley said, as if he had personal knowledge. “Ask Willow.”

Giles realized that Wesley was not at his most annoying when adjacent to reality; he was at his most annoying when he was right. He slammed his foot even further down on the accelerator and said: “Find a counterspell, Wesley. Find a way that we are impervious to their spells and can hurt them with our own.” As an afterthought he added: “Please.”

Wesley nodded and went back to his notes, Gunn holding the book open for him as they jolted over bumps in the road and took corners much too fast. All the time he was driving, Giles was trying not to think about Willow drawing people to her in what she believed to be a trap only to discover that she was unable to use her magic and had always been their intended prey…

***

Willow felt the power surge through her once again and shouted the binding spell. “Redimio lemma!” Bind them! The power was in her, she could feel it, and yet, as she pointed to the oncoming enemies and let the force of the spell fly, it dispersed as if it had hit a forcefield. They were now very close and this was her sixth attempt. She gathered her strength once again and this time called upon Hecate to assist her with one of her most powerful spells. “Hecate, habitum lemma in vestri queritor quod permissum lemma adveho haud propinquus!” Hecate, hold them in your grip and let them come no closer! Her Latin was always going to suck, but nevertheless she felt the power of the spell flow through her, exactly as it always did, felt it crackle from her fingertips, a flow of energy that should coil around them and freeze them where they stood and – 

Still they kept on coming. It was dark now, the sun sunk beneath the shoulder of the moor, and the only light came from their flaming torches and the red glow of their eyes. They wore the hooded habits of monks, and, like monks, one of them played the role of thurifer, swinging the censer back and forward to fill the air with incense. 

She made a last desperate attempt to throw out a spell but it just broke around them harmlessly; like water turned to steam as it touched a fire too hot to quench. 

“Your powers are useless against us, Witch.” They said ‘witch’ as if it was the word it rhymed with.

As they grabbed her she struggled desperately, but their clawed fingers just bit into her skin and her struggles made no impression upon their grip. She noticed that although they could maintain a surface glamour that gave the impression that they were human, their nails were long, yellow, and bear-like. The censer was wafted under her nose and she choked on the clogging scent. “Hey, actually Jewish here. Not enjoying the whole Christian church experience.”

Another red-eyed monk brandished an inverted cross at her, intoning: “We care nothing for your faiths. All who do not worship Narcoriel are damned.”

“So, you’re multi-denominational demon-raising crazy people, then?” She tried to force a smile as they lifted her feet off the ground. The glamour fell away from them, and she saw that not only did their eyes glow red but they also had mouths full of painfully sharp teeth and ears that would not have looked out of place on the scalier breeds of goblin. 

As they dragged her across the moors, their torches revealed flat stones and rough ground. Gritting her teeth, Willow tried to memorize another spell for repelling enemies, but although she threw out the incantation with all her power, the ones holding her didn’t so much as flinch, and one turned his glowing red eyes upon her, baring his pointed teeth in a derisive smile. “No witch can stand against us for you are nothing. You are no more than the sacrifice that fuels our spell.”

“Have you ever thought of using crystals instead?” Willow suggested. “Or maybe some nice chicken feet?”

The one holding her tightened his grip spitefully and she could barely restrain a gasp of pain. She tripped on something and, looking down, saw with horror that there was a dead policeman with his chest ripped open, eyes staring up at her sightlessly, one of his buttons still absurdly shiny despite the blood everywhere else. She screamed and then realized that actually screaming was a very good idea right now and screamed again as loud as she could. 

At once the red-eyed monk-demons turned on her and snarled out an incantation that froze the scream in her throat. 

“You will be silent, witch, as were your sisters in sorcery before you.”

Willow mouthed something that was very vulgar indeed; a phrase Kennedy had taught her and teased her into repeating back to her. She thought of the young woman with yearning, of how she never showed fear even when fear seemed like the logical response, and then a flame of longing licked through her that culminated strangely in one word: Faith. She had spent so many years shouting for Buffy, for Giles, for Xander, and now the person she found herself wanting the most wasn’t even Tara but Faith. She was actually glad that Tara wasn’t here to be killed by these creepy witch-hating demony monk guys, even if she was only absent because of already being dead; at least she had gone beyond fear and pain. No one could ever drag Tara across a moor towards a blaze of sacrificial flame while telling her that they were going to burn her alive, just as they’d always planned to, because she imagined herself strong enough to combat the worshippers of Narcoriel who bathed in the light of his darkness, while she was but a weak and foolish witch.

_Just give me back my powers and you’ll see how weak and foolish I am, and, hey, have you ever heard of dental floss because I feel like I’m standing in Haliotosis Central here…._

The rocks loomed ominously around her. There was a circle of flame and within it a pentagram with cauldrons arranged in a square within that, torches in the ground, presumably to draw the demon they were raising to the right place, the smell of blood and flame his guide. At the top of the pentagram a post had been jammed into the ground and towered over the circle like a gallows, a pile of unlit wood placed at its base in readiness. A stake. For burning witches. Just like in those horrible old woodcuts she’d never wanted to look at, always turning the page quickly so she wouldn’t have to think about what those women of the past must have suffered just for being born with some magic in their veins or being eccentric or having a pet cat. As they dragged her closer to the circle of flame, a mossy branch caught fire and spat sparks all around her, one of them stinging her cheek. She had a vivid flashback to the scent of those spellbooks burning as the fire blazed too close, her own mother one of the people feeding the flames. The scene-of-crime photo of Alicia’s murder flashed before her eyes; the dribbles of blood: Thou Shalt Not Suffer A Witch to Live. 

_At least the people who used to kill us believed we were in league with Satan. At least they had conviction. They weren’t just trying to buy off some demon so they could make it through the end of the world… And, hey – end of the world coming, should probably do something about stopping that…._

They pulled her through the burning circumference, which she desperately tried to scuff with her boot, ignoring the pain of flames licking at her as she tried to break the circle, but they were too quick, hauling her away while the censer-carrying one paused to make sure the circle was secure. By the firelight she could see the pentagram had been marked out on the ground with a powder that had been drenched in blood. She was hauled past a cauldron arranged upon a pentagram and as she looked down into it, she saw that it was filled with red liquid. The realization that it was pints and pints of blood – Alicia’s blood, or Dora or Karin or Mary’s, almost made her vomit right there and then, but as she struggled desperately, they were dragging her across their pentagram to the stake, hoisting her up and binding her to it, the coarse rope biting into her wrists as they pulled the knots tight; one of them saying another incantation over the rope as they tightened it.

Panicking was not going to solve this and it wasn’t as if it were the first time that she had been up close and way too snuggly with death. There were spells without words, ones she’d practised in case she was ever bound and gagged and say – about to be burned alive. She concentrated hard, saying a spell ordering the rope to untie itself in her mind. _Solvo vestri_. She tugged at the rope but it was still fast. She tried again: _Make these ropes as frail as paper_ , and when that didn’t work tried it in Latin: _Planto illa funis ut fragilitas ut membrana!_ Even allowing for her bad Latin she was sure those were the correct words and she could feel the power was still within her and yet it couldn’t seem to…get out. Couldn’t touch the monks or the rope or anything. She concentrated on the circle of flame, imagining the rain falling, dousing it, leaving it charred and smoking, not a spark left to start a new fire. The rain was perfect in her mind, slanting slate-grey threads of water, the rain of wet Wednesday afternoons. All she had to do was close her eyes and the thunder would sound, lightning streak across the clouded sky. Everything was connected and she could feel the roots of all the earth in a single flower. She could do this…

But when she opened her eyes no rain was falling, not even a drop. A demon monk snarled at her exultantly, clearly enjoying her helplessness and her confusion at her spells powerlessness against them. He thrust a faggot of sticks into the burning circle, the fire smouldering and then catching. He held up the burning torch in triumph, the new flame leaving a yellow reflection in the air a beat behind itself, and she realized that this was it; no spells could save her, they had somehow warded themselves or this place, this world within the circle, against any magic of hers. Which meant she was trapped here, a prisoner, unable to scream, even as the flames licked higher and burned hotter and devoured her alive…

***

Giles heard Willow scream as he opened the car door. It was faint but unmistakable. After more than half a decade on a Hellmouth he was more than able to recognize the individual screams of his friends. He was running before he even knew his seatbelt was undone, his hair standing on end and that familiar trickle of grey sweat coating his spine. Gunn shouted: “Giles, man! The weapons!” but he ran on, trusting those two to do their part, Wesley to bring the spell, and Gunn to bring an axe or three. He just needed to get to Willow before he lost another daughter.

Her scream was cut off so abruptly that he feared it was by a blow – or a knife slashing across her throat – he stumbled on the rough ground, sick with horror, heart pounding as he found himself saying over and over: Let her be saved, please, you took Jenny and Joyce and Buffy and Tara and Anya and Alicia, please let Willow be saved. 

He was afraid not only for her but for himself. He suspected he had never entirely recovered from Buffy’s death, especially as, for a long time, the girl who had come back from the dead had felt so unlike the vibrant positive one that he’d lost. Her return had been a miracle – or more accurately a dangerous piece of dark magic – but he had not dared to trust to it for a long time, afraid of the price that would be asked for such a resurrection, the price from Willow and from Buffy herself. He was so lacerated with grief for Alicia at the moment, so raw and wounded and close to breaking at every minute of every day, that he knew if he lost Willow too he would just split open, or do as Wesley had done, and retire to some twilight place where the grief could not reach him.

Of course, he thought, of course he can’t allow himself to believe in this reality, he’s lost too many people too soon. 

He thought of them, Cordelia and Angel, whom he had known, yet not as well as Wesley had done, and Fred and Lorne, who Willow had described to him, Fred sweetly eccentric and scientifically brilliant and Lorne with his anagogic powers and ever present cocktail glass, and Illyria who Gunn had tried to explain, that blue-haired, blue-skinned walking corpse of the woman Wesley had loved, being slowly infected by Fred’s humanity, as she had once infected Fred with her demonic essence. And before that, the other woman, Lilah, whose head Wesley had been forced to cut off, whom he had never seen but from Gunn’s description thought of always in monochrome, appearing in the slightly grainy filmstock of a forties femme fatale with cigarette smoke forever curling from an elegant black holder.

And here he was knowing that he would and would not survive if Willow died. That he would go on, somehow, because duty demanded it, and there was too much to do for him to simply give up, and yet how could one recover any joy of life after so many losses? How could one do more than wake every morning and simply exist?

He stumbled again, the waning crescent moon providing light enough by which to see, although not enough to avoid every tussock; the stars impossibly bright in a cloudless sky. His chest was starting to burn with the effort of running while trying not to let out a sob of sheer anxiety. He knew he should be used to this by now, imminent danger and imminent death circling the people he cared for, but it was the one thing to which he could never seem to become reconciled. It was something the Watchers’ Council had never been able to instil in any Watcher that he had ever met; however hard they tried.

He could hear Gunn behind him now, and Wesley muttering something to himself. They were a thunder of approaching feet while he hoped he was still running in the right direction. His toe caught on something solid and he was hurtling through the air to crashland onto moorland. Gasping for the breath knocked out of him, he noticed that his head was barely an inch from a jagged rock that would have undoubtedly have fractured his skull. 

“Giles…?” Gunn crouched down next to him. “Are you okay, man? Damn, you nearly split your head open.”

“I’m all right.” As Giles twisted around, dazzled by the white light of Gunn’s flashlight, Wesley sprinkled some herbs and then tipped some holy water onto him before tossing a lit candle into the air which then burst into a bright flare of crimson as he began to intone in Greek:

Apollo, εγώ τιμολόγιο δικό σου βοηθάω. προστατεύω άντραs από το ακολούθησα του Narcoriel…

Giles found himself translating automatically. Too many years spent studying ancient and demonic languages for the words not to come to him at once despite Wesley’s strange and archaic usage: “Apollo, I invoke your aid. Protect this man from the followers of Narcoriel.”

“Apollo?” Gunn demanded. “We’re going all ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ now?”

“It’s a convention.” Giles shook off the Holy water that was seeping into his jacket, blinking as more herbs were tossed into the air above him and came pattering down onto his face like a fall of rain. “One invokes the power that the idea of the god possesses from being worshipped by so many for so long. The faith directed at the concept of what that god represents – even in the distant past – makes it a powerful repository of positive or negative energy that can be used to fuel a spell.”

Gunn seemed to understand that at once. “I got you. I’ve read ‘Small Gods’.”

Ignoring them both, Wesley summoned a ball of blue light and made it explode over Giles; the flame licking around him in a way that was more than a little disconcerting. “…ας δικό τουs συλλαβίζω διάλειμμα πάνω αυτόν όπως αδύναμος όπως έναs οκεανόs επάνω σε ακτή… ας αυτόν να είμαι προστάτευσα και κρατώ όλος δικός του δύναμη και κλαρινέτο του μυαλό εναντίον δικό τουs μοχθηρός συλλαβίζω…”

_Let their spells break over him powerlessly as an ocean on the shore. Let him be protected and keep all his strength and clarity of mind against their evil spells._

Giles staggered to his feet, flinching as he saw that Gunn’s flashlight was now shining on the face of a dead uniformed policeman, lying on his back on the moor. His heart appeared to have been ripped out and he followed the beam of Gunn’s questing light to see it glistening wetly on the ground nearby. Apparently this policeman had been of so little consequence to his murderers that they had not even troubled to keep his heart.

“There’s no time…” 

Gunn caught his arm. “You can’t save Willow if those witch-hater generals have turned you into a tadpole. Wes, finish zapping him with the anti-magic mojo.”

He struggled against Gunn’s grip as Wesley shouted a web of words around him, feeling the power of the spell sizzle on his skin and then sink in. Wesley turned to Gunn, took a sword from his hand and handed it to Giles, then said, “Let him go.”

Giles ran. He could hear the sound of more Greek being spoken behind him, and knew Wesley was saying another spell, reading from his wind-whipped notes as Gunn directed the beam of the flashlight onto them while they both ran across the moors.

All his thoughts were for Willow. He could see the glow of firelight now, the looming shadow of rocks, and then he was over the crest of another rise of moorland, and he could see everything – the circle of flame, the swinging cauldrons, the monks walking in a circle around a pentagram, and looming up behind them on the edge of the pentagram – the struggling figure of Willow, bound fast to a stake, and coughing violently as the smoke from the burning wood at her feet began to smoulder into flame.

He ran, sword at the ready, the absolute clarity descending that sharpened the mind to a knife-point in battle. It was too easy to be merciless on such occasions, but today he hardly thought that would be a problem. 

A monk swung around, eyes flame-red in its inhuman face, teeth bared in a snarl as it stretched out a clawed hand and threw a fireball straight at him. Even as he flinched in readiness, it dispersed as harmlessly against him as a handful of maize. The monk’s snarl doubled in volume, a growl of furious disappointment and frustration.

Giles jumped through the outer circle of flame, intent on getting to Willow and setting her free before the fire caught at her clothing. As a monk swung an axe at him, he parried it with his sword, kicking the demon off before driving his sword deep into its heart. It fell back, snarling with fury, and one of the others broke off from its chanting to charge at him. The last time he had felt this focused in a fight had been when he had gone after Angelus after Jenny’s death; now as then he welcomed the rage, let it carry him forward, ducking a vicious sword blow easily, snatching the axe from the dying fingers of the first demon as it fell to its knees, then used sword and axe together with focused concentration, wanting to get to Willow, and determined to kill anyone who tried to stop him.

He heard Gunn shout: “You get Willow. We’ll stop the ritual!” but he didn’t even trouble to look round, all his attention on the demon monk in front of him, its red eyes and malevolent snarling mouth.

“You stink of witchcraft,” it snapped. “You are no more than a warlock. You are a powerless against us. Kneel and beg for our mercy.”

“No, I really don’t think I will.” Thinking of this being Alicia’s last sight, these pitiless red eyes watching the blood drain from her, he thrust the sword into its heart and as it staggered backwards, swung his axe to take off its head with one clean blow. 

Until this moment, he guessed the other monks had considered him no more than a nuisance, intent upon beginning the ritual that would culminate in the burning to death of a witch and the summoning of their demon lord, but as he ran to Willow, they turned as one, red eyes glaring at him. But as they started towards him, Gunn and Wesley were there, guarding the way to Willow and to Giles, Gunn armed with an axe and Wesley with his book of spells. As the demon monks rushed at them, Wesley kept reading from his book, raising a finger for emphasis here and there like some demented vicar on the field of battle, while Gunn swung his axe with such gusto it took off a demon’s head. 

Willow was struggling desperately, and Giles hastily kicked the smouldering wood away from the base of the stake, finding it was already burning underneath, cinders rising up into the night like fireflies, sparks adhering to his trousers and sweater and burning tiny charred holes in the cloth before they were extinguished on his skin. He cut through the rope binding her to the stake and she fell forward into his arms. He heard a sob and realized it was his, a sound of sheer relief as he inhaled the scent of her hair and felt her trembling his arms, scared and singed, but very much alive. 

Then he was shaking her angrily. “I told you not to do this! I told you to be careful!”

Willow’s green eyes looked huge in her elfin face, full of remorse and shock. He pulled her back into his arms again and held her tightly, his fingers automatically reaching for the knots around her wrists as he did so, and beginning to undo them, tugging angrily at the bonds as he continued to scold her: “I thought Xander was the most irresponsible of all of you and Dawn the most likely to get herself in trouble, but, no, now I think back it was always you. Dabbling in magic completely unsupervised after all the times I told you not to; reading books you had no business reading and… I should have stopped you. I should have known what you were doing. I should have never encouraged you. It’s my fault you ever went down that path. It’s my fault you were…” Then the last knot came loose and he realized that it was Willow he held, not Alicia, and that she understood exactly who it was that he was blaming and why as he straightened her back up again and saw the tears in her eyes; tears of sympathy for him. Then her eyes widened and she gestured frantically behind him.

He spun around as Gunn yelled: “Giles, look out!”

He shoved Willow behind him and brandished his sword as two demon monks approached. Gunn was fighting like a hero. It was a shock to see him swinging that axe with such gusto, such speed and precision and extraordinary grace, as if he were only half alive unless he was doing this – fighting the good fight, making the world a better place. Wesley was ducking the sword swings of red-eyed shrieking demon monks and tossing more handfuls of herbs in their direction. They screamed when the herbs touched them, and at another quiet murmur from him one began to smoke, before bursting into a pillar of flame. The others all shrieked a non-human wail of rage and Giles wondered if this was the death they most feared, the one that Wesley was dealing out. He suspected most women feared to die by the hand of male creatures they did not know, alone on the moors with no way of screaming for help as they felt their life blood ebbing, so, even if it were these creatures’ darkest fear, he thought it served them right. 

Wesley seemed completely focused on the spells he was saying, leafing through his translated notes as if reading a sermon and intoning each word very clearly, but almost absent-minded in the way he jerked his head out of the way of their swinging blades. The spells, linked as they were to lessons of the past and a time he knew to be real, evidently feeling far more important to him than the possible death offered by possible demons. Giles wasn’t in any way surprised when Gunn grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him firmly behind him. 

As the two monks approached, Giles advanced to meet them, positively eager to feel his sword cut through more bone and flesh. This wasn’t just about ridding the world of demon monks and murderers, this was about wanting someone to pay for all the grief in his heart. As he swung his sword, Wesley tossed another handful of herbs onto the demon nearest to Giles, murmuring a quiet incantation, and then Giles was having to stagger back half-blinded, as it erupted into flame. The other demon broke off to wail its rage and Wesley took the opportunity to toss another handful of herbs onto that one. As it turned into a sheet of blue fire, a demon flung itself at Wesley, snarling furiously, and looking more than happy to rip him limb from limb with its clawed fingers alone, sinking them into his shoulders as it bore him to the ground. Giles decapitated it with great pleasure as it drew back its head to snap at him, and then yanked the headless body from him. Wesley put up a hand and Gunn grasped it, the way he hauled him to his feet looking as familiar as if they had performed these battle steps a hundred times before, and then Wesley was on his feet again, none the worse, and still reading from his book. He tossed a handful of herbs onto the headless corpse, moved his fingers over it and then murmured a quiet spell. It ignited into flame and Gunn stepped back quickly.

Wesley glanced up at him. “This stops them from regenerating. Otherwise there’s a chance other members of their sect might be able to call them back.”

As Giles turned around to survey the smoking field of battle, he saw that the cauldrons of blood had been overturned in the battle and that the red liquid was now seeping into the ground, smoke still billowing from the smouldering remnants of the broken circle like mist and the bodies of dead demons scattered across the half-scuffed pentagram.

Willow tugged at his sleeve and pointed to her mouth then at the dead monks, gesturing furiously. Giles understood and caught at Wesley’s arm. “I think they’ve stolen her voice.”

“Oh.” Wesley turned the pages of his book, quite unperturbed. “This should undo any minor spells of theirs cast upon her.” More Greek. More little finger waggles. A tossing of herbs in her general direction and Willow was talking again apparently halfway through a sentence she had begun while still rendered artificially silent:

“…but I didn’t know about there being spells that only worked on witches. I thought it was me, stopping me from doing the spell-making because of the flaying and the veiny and the black eyes and I thought I could make them come to me – and I did – but then it turned out to be a trap – and it was them making me come to them all the time and I tried and tried to make the spells work but they didn’t and I tried to break the circle but that didn’t work either and there was no rain even though it was in my head all the time, but it wasn’t outside it and then there was fire and getting very hot and starting to smoke and not wanting to be dead at all in that way and then you came and – that was good – even with the yelling – it was very, very good…”

Giles pointed a finger at her. “Don’t ever do that again.”

She looked like the little girl he’d first met in the library of Sunnydale. “I won’t, I promise.”

Wesley wandered off to cast herbs onto the dead monks, Gunn hurrying to accompany him in case any of the monks were just playing dead. Giles reached out to hook a strand of Willow’s red hair behind her ear as behind them there was the whoosh of another sheet of flame and another dead demon turned to blackened soot.

Giles had been subconsciously awaiting the arrival of the police for some time. It made sense to him that the moors would have been staked out while these murders were taking place, and the dead policeman seemed to confirm it. Surely there should have been the wail of sirens, the blare of loud hailers, a demand for them all to put down their extremely lethal weapons and come quietly? But the silence just rolled on around them as Wesley went around the site of the proposed ritual methodically consecrating the earth to render it useless for any more demonic sacrifices. Every demon monk had been banished into a gust of blue flame now, all the fires put out – Gunn had methodically kicked the circle out of existence and then stamped on the sparks before they could ignite the moor, before he and Giles between them had levered the stake out of the ground and laid it flat. Even with Wesley’s herb sprinkling and solemn intonation of spells, it seemed only prudent to make the place look less inviting to those who were drawn to making midnight sacrifices.

Only as they turned away from the wreckage of the ritual site, a shivering Willow wrapped in Giles’ jacket and still chafing her bruised wrists, did Giles see the pale flash of skin under the shadow of a looming rock. The blue-white beam of Gunn’s flashlight was directed ahead of them, like an eager gundog quartering the moor, but there was enough starlight for Giles to catch a glimpse of what seemed to be a dark-coated figure watching them. For a moment he wondered if it was Angel and then the man stepped forward and opened his coat so that Giles could see the silver flash of an official badge. Then the man nodded to him and gave him a thumbs up before stepping back into the shadow of the rocks, leaving Giles with the distinct impression that their intervention had somehow been expected and they had not let their presumably friendly observer down.

In days past he would have thought it the work of Quentin Travers – so completely up the man’s street to be a spectator to events to which most normal people would feel the need to intervene – but Travers had died along with the other Watchers who had been in the Council Headquarters at the time of the explosion. There was no one else who worked for the Watchers’ Council who would waste his time in such frivolity, not now when they were so overburdened with Slayers and left with so few Watchers. Giles wondered what the police did in areas of mystical convergence where it was known that things did indeed go bump in the night and where they were not under orders from a corrupt Mayor to pretend that everything was all right. Did they try to battle demonic phenomena themselves? Or did they rely on others to tackle those particular problems while they dealt with their own? The latter approach argued a certain pragmatism that seemed in keeping with the man in the shadows, but the dead constable on the moor suggested that although they might have hoped for some supernatural agency to deal with the problem of demon monks raising creatures of the damned dimensions – supposing they had even been able to realize that was what they were up against – they had also wanted to try to prevent any more women from dying by more practical intervention.

Giles decided that he would watch very carefully any statement put out by the Harrogate police in the next few days and try to gain a clue into what their relationship might be with the supernatural – flat out denial, non-combative acceptance, or warriors in a losing battle for which they were perhaps seeking allies.

He bustled Willow into the car, still scolding her as he did so yet doing up her seatbelt for her in case her arms were stiff. “I’m very sorry,” she said penitently, not for the first time.

“You didn’t know,” Gunn told her. “You had all that magic mojo. You figured you had it covered. We’ve all been there. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve gone into a battle thinking me and my crew were taking on six vamps when it was closer to twenty…”

“Yes, that’s very reassuring, Gunn. That will make me feel so much better next time I go into battle with you.” Giles started the engine. When he looked into the rearview mirror, Wesley’s hair was looking even more unkempt from the wind and his being knocked down by a murderous demon monk, but his eyes looked perfectly sane and when it mattered he had functioned with perfect efficiency. 

“I am very grateful to you both for your assistance this evening,” Giles added. “Without your fighting abilities, Gunn, and Wesley’s perseverance in translating that spell book after no encouragement from the rest of us, Willow would undoubtedly be dead by now.”

Gunn shrugged. “I’ve been wanting to mix it up with some demons anyway, and it’s not like we don’t owe Willow big time. Isn’t that right, Wes?”

He nudged Wesley gently in the ribs and the man looked up at Willow and gave her a kind smile. “Yes, indeed. We were glad we could help and we still owe Willow for giving back Angel his soul.”

Gunn bit his lip. “And saving our lives, Wes? She did that too, remember?”

“Oh yes.” Wesley seemed a little less grateful for that. “That was very…kind of her too.”

Willow said tentatively. “Did I mention being sorry – and grateful not to be all crispy crittered? Very, very grateful.”

“Yes, Willow, I believe you did.” Giles switched on the engine of the car, and the headlights beamed into the darkness, giving colour back to grass and tumps of stone, shining on the comforting normality of waste paper basket. “Now, let’s go home.”

***

Willow woke to the sunlight pouring in from the open door of her bedroom. She could hear the sounds of traffic, engines turning over as cars waited in a line for the lights to change. Alicia must have awoken to exactly these sounds, and now she never would again, but at least no more witches would die so that Narcoriel could be raised. 

“No thanks to me, of course.” 

Willow sat upright, and realized she was very stiff, that her wrists still ached, and so did her throat – that would be from the screaming – and she had evidently slept on the couch for the second night running. She turned her head with difficulty – her neck was locked up tight – and there was Giles, dozing, with his glasses askew, and his mouth slightly open. His chest rose and fell under the blood-spattered shirt in which he had evidently fallen asleep and she realized she was still wearing his jacket. She would have liked to give him a hug, but that would wake him up and he looked so peaceful. If she’d had a camera she would have taken a picture of him so she could email it to Buffy to show her that he really was alive and well. There were no words for how much she would have liked a photograph of Xander doing just that right now, but there was no one to take photographs of Xander at the moment except Xander himself, and that was a difficult thing to do when one was asleep.

She imagined how it would have been if Anya had gone with him; with what mixture of exasperation and fondness she would have received those odd little postcards from her:

_Xander tells me that it’s traditional to send small cards to one’s friends, featuring a picture of somewhere considerably more picturesque than the place where the recipient is currently living. He says this is not to make them envious but I am mistrustful of this information. Today we visited a village that was very dusty and had many poor people in it who did not understand English or possess televisions. They have clearly not grasped the importance of Capitalism. A few miles from here I once wreaked vengeance upon a local chieftain who was unfaithful to his third wife. There are still scorch marks on some of the trees. I am hoping that we can visit the site so that I may take photographs. I hope that you are continuing to have lesbian sex on a regular basis as all medical practitioners now agree that frequent orgasms are good for the blood pressure. I am continuing to have sex on a regular basis, but not the lesbian kind. I am having sex with Xander, sometimes under the stars, which is not as romantic as it sounds, on account of the insects and also the lions, which can roar at inappropriate moments_. 

She had never expected to miss Anya, but she did. It was horrible to think of her still under all that rubble with no way of retrieving her body so that she could be buried properly. Xander had said it didn’t matter where her body was, she was still with him, in his memories and his heart; but it helped to have a grave to sit beside and mourn sometimes. That reminded her…

She showered and changed into clean clothes as quickly and as quietly as she could, not wanting to disturb Giles who was still drowsing on the couch. Sounds from the teashop downstairs told her that Judith and Jean were already hard at work. The quiet murmur of Gunn and Wesley’s voices told her they would soon be waking up Giles and arguing about who got to shower first, so she slipped downstairs.

“Would you like a breakfast tray?” Judith asked her kindly.

“I’d love one in about fifteen minutes,” Willow admitted. “The men are still getting up.” 

“Cathy next door said you came in late last night.” There was a question in the woman’s eyes and Willow beckoned to her to sit down and beckoned to Jean too. 

“Yes, we did. We were up on the moor.” Ever since she stepped into the shower, she had been trying to think of the right compromise between the truth and an answer that would satisfy without demanding too many questions. Giles had been able to tell Miranda the whole truth last night but most people couldn’t comprehend the whole truth about demons and sacrifice and dark magic. Saying that the people who killed Alicia were dead would make Giles and Gunn look like murderers and saying that the killers were in police custody would make them look out for a trial that was never going to happen.

Judith’s eyes widened and she reached out to take Willow’s hand. “You got them?”

Picking her words carefully, Willow said: “The…people who killed Alicia, Dora, Karin and Mary were…well, they were practising black magic. They had a spellbook and they were trying to summon a demon.”

“Crazy people,” Jean said. 

Willow thought it was interesting that Judith didn’t agree with her. “Not entirely crazy. Some magic does work. I know we’re told it doesn’t, but it does, sometimes. And it’s very dangerous. Wesley found a book that could stop their spells from working and the people who killed Alicia, their spell…went wrong, and the magic they’d been trying to make with the blood of the people they had killed…killed them.”

Jean said: “Good” emphatically just as Judith said: “Serves them right, if you ask me.”

“I think it did too. But there won’t be a trial on account of them all being…well, basically, little piles of ash. They killed a policeman too, so that will be in the paper, but I think the police will have to say that the case is unsolved because of the little piles of ash factor, but it isn’t, I promise you. They really are dead.”

Judith enveloped her in a warm hug while Jean said that she was going to make some waffles for ‘Mr Gunn’ as a reward. “Bought the waffle iron yesterday,” she said triumphantly. “And I’ve found a wonderful recipe for the batter.”

Willow thought that her chances of getting Gunn to embrace an alien culture and learn to enjoy toast and marmalade had just dwindled alarmingly if Jean was going to pander to his every need. She’d be making him hamburgers and hot dogs any minute instead of teaching him to enjoy oxtail soup. From the kitchen Jean triumphantly held aloft a brightly-coloured hardcover book with the title: ‘It’s All American Food’. 

“I’m sure Gunn would learn to like egg and cress sandwiches and bread and butter pudding if we just persevered a little longer,” she said hopefully.

“Break him in gently, maybe.” Judith took one of the sugar cubes from the bowl and crunched on it thoughtfully. “Don’t want to frighten him off with spotted dick too soon, do we?” She lowered her voice to add: “Are he and Mr Giles’s brother…?”

It took Willow a moment to work out who she was referring to. “You mean Wesley? Oh he’s not Giles’ brother. They just…used to work together and then Wesley’s family were….” _Mystically comatose before ascending to a higher plane; hollowed out by an Old One; either dust in an alley or rescued by higher powers who need them to be their champions…._ “Um…in an accident. And his father’s very…scary. So, Giles thought he ought to look after him and Gunn until they were better.”

Judith nodded. “Was it a car crash? With them both being injured, Jean and I thought it was probably a car crash.”

Willow thought about Connor and Wolfram & Hart and the Senior Partners and Cyrus Vail and the Circle of the Black Thorn and all the decisions they’d made to take them to the point where she had been needed to snatch them back from death. “More like a trainwreck really.”

“Did a lot of people die?”

She thought about what those fifty thousand demons of the apocalypse could have done to Los Angeles. “Less than you’d think.”

“So, are they…?” 

It took her a moment to remember the first question. “Oh. I don’t think so. Although that doesn’t mean they won’t be…later.” She thought of how much she’d loved Oz; how if he hadn’t left she might have stayed with him forever and never known about this other side of herself. Or would she have loved Tara anyway? Would they have started to exchange looks in that wannabe wicca group and felt the connection and…? She supposed she’d never know now. “I don’t think they think of each other like that, but that doesn’t mean…”

Judith nodded sagely. “My sister’s youngest boy ran off with the milkman. I never knew men did that too. Not milkmen. A nice florist or a hairdresser, but you don’t expect it from a milkman. Had a wife and a baby too. It was quite the scandal around here. They’re living in Leeds now.”

“Oh.” Willow thought about it for a moment, trying to banish the unwanted image of Anya in a milkmaid costume that had come into her mind. “We don’t have milkmen.”

“Just as well maybe if that’s what can happen.” Judith rose to her feet. “I’m only asking about it because my middle daughter’s single at the moment. She was wondering…about Mr Gunn and Mr Giles’ brother… So, they’re really not brothers?”

“No. They could be distant cousins though. Giles thought there could be a connection on his mother’s side.”

Judith grimaced. “Perhaps I should just tell her he is gay. I mean a maybe’s no use to a girl, is it?”

Willow tried to envisage a time when Gunn wouldn’t be obsessively protective of Wesley and Wesley wouldn’t need to keep him in sight to be certain he wasn’t a hallucination. “Probably best.”

By the time she carried the laden tray upstairs in triumph, the men were all awake and much cleaner than the last time she had seen them. Gunn had apparently got Wesley into the shower and cleaned up and out of it again and was now towelling his hair dry while Wesley looked as if he would really like him to stop. 

“Not six, remember?” she reminded him.

Gunn put the towel into Wesley’s hands a little guiltily. “Sorry, man.”

“I like your clothes, Wesley,” she told him brightly. She didn’t add that she particularly liked the way his grey t-shirt was a good inch longer than his green sweater as it looked so cute.

Wesley looked down at his ensemble in guarded approval. “They’re from before.” 

“He wore this to get rid of the Thesulac,” Gunn explained. “It was in his suitcase.” As Wesley looked at him in confusion, he added hastily: “Not the Thesulac, the clothes.” 

Gunn was wearing sweatpants and a baseball jersey while Giles was wearing jeans and a soft blue sweater. Willow noticed that she was also wearing jeans and a soft blue sweater, which was going to make them look even more like relatives than usual. They really were going to have to stop unconsciously coordinating. “Look what Jean made for you.” She wafted the tray under Gunn’s nose and he lit up.

“Waffles?”

“And maple syrup. She’s got a book of American cookery just for you. Oh, and Judith’s daughter was interested in you.”

Gunn brightened even more. “Really?”

“But I told Judith to tell her you were gay.”

“You…what?”

“It seemed less complicated than trying to explain that you need to take care of Wesley because you’re the only thing he thinks may possibly not be a hallucination,” she explained, putting the tray down on the table. 

“Yeah, but…” Gunn pouted rather prettily. “You couldn’t come up with…I don’t know…something cool…?”

She put her hands on her hips. “You don’t think being gay is cool?”

He seemed to realize belatedly what he’d said. “I mean…sure it’s _cool_ , I mean, I’m cool with the gay thing and it’s cool, it’s just…there are things that are cool _er_.”

“Such as?”

“Being a secret agent who can’t get involved with anyone in case they get murdered by Russian spies.”

Giles sighed heavily. “Wouldn’t telling everyone that you’re a secret agent somewhat invalidate the ‘secret’ part of your pretend profession?”

Willow nodded. “Exactly. You’d be much more likely to have a cover story that you’re gay so as to avoid the whole girlfriend being murdered by Russian spies thing. Are we still spying on the Russians anyway? Because I didn’t think they were doing much except queuing for bread and building a semi-capitalist post-communist infrastructure?”

Wesley looked at Gunn curiously. “When did you become a secret agent?”

“He’s not a secret agent,” Willow assured him. “He’s just unavoidably gay.”

“Well, when did you become gay?” Wesley’s eyes widened. “It was Jasmine, wasn’t it?”

“No, Wes. Willow’s just…making shit up, okay? So we don’t have to beat the girls off with a stick when they come after us, which they would otherwise do. On account of us being so hot and studly.”

Wesley looked down at his protruding inch of t-shirt in some confusion. “We are?”

“Yeah, not to mention irresistibly gorgeous.”

“But not secret agents?”

“No.”

“Or gay?”

“I think the jury’s still out on that one, Wesley.” Giles reached across to help himself to a buttered crumpet. “You know why anyone would prefer a tasteless grid-section of batter to a nice buttered crumpet is completely beyond me.”

Gunn bit into his waffle and said through ecstatic chewing: “You stick to your food, Henry Higgins, and I’ll stick to mine.”

Willow let them eat until she judged their blood sugar was now back at a level where they could concentrate – she had years of practice at gauging that with Xander and believed herself adept enough to estimate it to within three decimal points of a Twinkie. Then she moved the teapot over, cleared a space on the centre of the table and put the box down. It was odd to look up and find those three pairs of eyes fixed on her so curiously: brown eyes, green eyes, and blue eyes all focused absolutely on her cardboard box. If only the boys had focused on her emerging bosom with that much attention in High School she would have avoided all those insecurity issues. 

She reached in and picked up the piece of amber. “This is mine.” She handed Giles the amethyst. “This is yours.” She carefully placed the strand of gold trapped in white quartz down beside the butter dish. “This is for Xander, when he comes back.” The black tourmaline looked no less beautiful in the morning sunlight streaming in through the window of Gunn and Wesley’s bedroom than it had in the store. “Hold out your hands, Wesley.” He did so, his obedience still taking her by surprise; occasionally catching disconcerting glimpses behind this unshaven haggard ghost of that shiny brylcreemed young man with the briefcase. He gazed at the tourmaline with the same lack of comprehension that his earlier self would have shown if she had placed it in his hands. “Hold it up to the light,” she told him gently.

He did so, letting the light pour through it, revealing the purple inside the black, the soul inside the shadow. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

It was a relief that he thought so too. One could never tell if men were capable of comprehending the world in the same way as women sometimes. She handed Gunn the brilliant red cluster of vanadinite crystals. “You two get more,” she explained, handing him the green malachite and Wesley the blue lapis.

“Thank you.” Wesley looked at them with a little boy’s fascination. “I had a bit of a rock collection when I was a child. I inherited some from my grandfather and my father let me pick them up when we went on field trips because they’re useful for spells. I just liked the way they looked. My second cousin, Lionel, collected birds’ eggs. He always was a beastly little toad. He used to give me Chinese burns just because he was bigger than me. He fell out of a tree trying to steal the eggs from a tawny owl’s nest and broke both his legs. I probably should have felt sorry for him but I remember feeling terribly pleased. My father couldn’t bear him either. I think it was the only thing we ever agreed on. Well, that, and that I would never amount to anything.” He held the tourmaline up to the light again, seeming to enjoy just watching the sunlight stream through it. “This is better than anything I ever had though. I only had a tiny piece of tourmaline and it wasn’t this colour.” He didn’t understand yet, but he liked them anyway, which was nicer somehow.

She handed Gunn the bright sulphur and saw his eyes widen as he looked between the red, the green and the yellow that he now held. “I get you,” he said.

“Do you?”

He held up the vanadinite. “Cordy.” The malachite. “Lorne.” The sulphur. “Spike.”

“And this is Jenny.” Giles was still holding the amethyst gently in his hand. “And the amber is Tara.”

“Yes.” She gave Wesley the tektite. “It’s because they don’t have graves. Not even Jenny and Tara any more, since Sunnydale was destroyed. Because we don’t have any one place to go to remember them. So, I thought we could have a little rock garden for them.”

Wesley’s eyes widened. “Is this…? Is this really…?” He held it out to Giles. “Look…”

“Good Lord.” Giles lifted up his glasses to look under them. “Is that tektite?”

“Yes.” She beamed proudly. “From Texas.”

Wesley had been marvelling at the red showing through the glassy black surface, inviting Giles to admire its weight, but now he looked up at her in shock. “It’s Fred?”

“Yes. It’s something you can remember her by and hold when you want to think about her.”

He had gone very still but now looked at her without any confusion or sign of disorientation; for the first time she felt as if he was really seeing her, as a fellow human being, not some strange blip on his radar who had no business being there, but as another person. She could almost see his logic circuits assessing and discarding the possibility of making this part of a hell punishment, unable to think of any reason why she should do this for him if she were not, in fact, real, when it was clearly something that had never occurred to him and so could not be a projection. He closed his hand on the tektite. “Thank you.”

Holding the tektite against his chest he looked back at the tourmaline and lapis. “This is Angel. This is Illyria.” He leaned across to look at Gunn’s crystals. “Cordelia, Lorne. Spike.”

“Everyone who isn’t here with you that you miss.” She felt a little silly now that the crystals were sitting there being pieces of coloured rock. “I just thought it might help.”

Gunn held up the vanadinite. “Man, Cordy would have loved this.”

Willow grimaced. “I don’t know. I think she’d probably rather be remembered by a pair of Manola Blahniks, but it was the best I could find.”

Giles opened his hand to reveal the amethyst. “Thank you, Willow. It does – help, I mean.”

“Yes.” Wesley was still looking at her as if she had only just come into focus. “It really does.”

They spent half an hour arguing about where to site the tank until finally agreeing that it should go on the breakfast bar between the kitchen and the living space, where it would get the evening light flowing through it. Gunn liked the idea of filling the tank with water but Giles had to point out that their crystals would very quickly get covered in green algae if they did, and Anya’s white quartz in particular would quickly lose its purity. Then there were more discussions about which crystal should go in which position. Giles didn’t want Jenny’s amethyst on the same side of the tank as Angel’s tourmaline and Gunn was adamant that Spike and Angel had to be kept separate. “Cause otherwise we’re going to find those rocks have been kicking gravel at each other while we’re asleep.”

They all looked at him but it was Wesley who said gently: “They’re not really them, Gunn. They’re just symbolic.”

Gunn took the vanadinite from him. “Cordy would want to be with Angel. Illyria can be with Spike.”

“She used to tread on his head,” Wesley pointed out.

“Then she can definitely be with Spike.” Giles put the sulphur firmly next to the lapis. 

“Lorne needs to be with Fred, and Fred needs to be near to Cordelia.” Wesley moved the crystals a pernickety fraction of an inch from how Gunn had them arranged. 

“Jenny should be with Tara and Anya.” Willow reached into the tank and placed the amber next to the amethyst, her sleeve catching on the top of the tank as she did so.

She looked up to find Giles wincing at the bruises on her wrists. Rubbing them self-consciously, she added: “Still grateful for not being dead, by the way.”

Wesley gazed at the bruises intently and then reached out a forefinger to touch the skin very gently. “It feels hot.”

“I think there’s more to come out,” she explained. “They weren’t respecting my personal space when they were tying those ropes.”

Wesley rolled up his own sleeves to reveal excessively bony but unbruised forearms. “That’s how I knew Angelus wasn’t real.”

Willow was gazing in fascination at the jut of his painfully thin wrist and didn’t at once understand the reason for Gunn’s sharp intake of breath.

“What?” Gunn demanded.

Wesley glanced up at him. “When he grabbed me, it hurt, but there weren’t any bruises, so I knew he couldn’t be real.”

“You mean if I’d just…? When I’d wanted to if I’d only…” Gunn took Wesley by the shoulders and moved him into the centre of the room, Wesley obediently shuffling after him in some confusion. “Giles…?” Gunn added.

Giles looked up. “What?”

“Catch him.”

And then Gunn had punched Wesley so hard that Giles only just grabbed him before he went slamming into the wall. Holding onto a dazed Wesley who was feeling the left side of his face in shock, Giles said angrily: “What the hell are you playing at?”

Gunn shook his hand, knuckles evidently stinging. “I’m doing what I should have done a week ago. Thanks for catching him.” He grabbed Wesley by the front of the sweater and yanked him towards the bathroom.

Willow saw Giles’s expression echoing her own feelings of shocked disbelief, and they both hurried to cram into the bathroom after Gunn before he did something else inexplicably cruel to Wesley.

Gunn had hold of Wesley by the shoulders and had shoved him in front of the mirror. “Can you see it?”

Wesley looked over his shoulder at him in confusion. “You hit me.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Yes. A lot.”

“Good. That means you know it was real. Now look at your face.” When Wesley continued to give him a look of reproach, Gunn turned his head and made him face the bathroom mirror. “Do you see the mark?”

Wesley tentatively touched his bruised cheekbone. “Yes. Ow…” He snatched his fingers away and Willow saw that it was already mottling, the skin a little scraped and showing the crimson foreshadowing of what was clearly going to be a spectacular bruise. “Why did you hit me?”

“This is why.” Gunn leaned forward and tapped the reflection where the bruise was. “Angelus didn’t leave a bruise because he wasn’t real. I just did. What does that make me?”

Wesley’s eyes widened and Willow thought she could see the light of some conviction in them. He touched his cheekbone again, pressing his fingers against it to feel the pain, wincing but smiling at the same time, face lit up. He gave a half-choke, half-laugh of absolute relief. “Real. It makes you real.” He pressed it and winced again. “And a bit of a bastard.”

Gunn grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him around, Wesley flinching in anticipation of another blow, before he was pulled into Gunn’s arms and hugged within an inch of his life. Gunn beamed at them over his shoulder. “He said I was real.”

Giles smiled despite himself, taking off his glasses to say: “You two really are incredibly wearing company, you know.”

“Hey, it’s part of our charm.” Gunn assured him. He straightened Wesley back up. “So, tell me again, what am I?”

“You’re real.” Wesley half-smiled. “And still a bit of a bastard.”

“And are you dead or alive?”

“Alive.”

“And are you in a hell dimension or are you in the English market town of Harrogate?” Gunn said ‘English market town of Harrogate’ in his best Giles voice.

“Harrogate.” Wesley was definitely smiling now. He already looked more solid, as if reality had been waiting until this moment to flow through him.

“Now, do Giles and Willow have to belt you as well or are you going to believe they’re real too?”

As he looked at them warily, Willow waved to him. “I could just stick a pin in you if you like. I could use a small one.”

Giles put his glasses back on. “I’m perfectly happy to hit you, Wesley. It would be no trouble at all.”

“No, that’s fine.” Wesley felt his bruised cheekbone again. “If Gunn says you’re real I’m sure you are.”

Giles smiled again, looking five years younger than he had the night before. “I think this calls for a celebration, don’t you? And perhaps some kind of discussion about what we do next?”

“What do you mean?” Gunn was already getting arnica out of the bathroom cabinet, smacking Wesley’s hands out of the way when he tried to take it from him and tilting his head up. “You can’t see, let me do it.” As he put the ointment onto the bruise with surprisingly gentle fingers, he held Giles’s gaze. “I guess you mean us going our separate ways?”

“No, actually.” Giles was still smiling quietly to himself. “I wasn’t thinking of that at all. Why don’t we all go and sit down and have another cup of tea and then perhaps you could listen to my business proposition?”

“Does it involve hitting me?” Wesley winced as Gunn finished applying ointment to his bruise. 

“Only if you’re more than usually annoying,” Giles assured him. “It involves us obtaining a commission from the Watchers’ Council to set up a covert operation to investigate an area of mystical convergence.”

At the words ‘mystical convergence’ Wesley looked even more as if he had finally come home. “Like outside the Hyperion?”

“Yes, but smaller and less commercialised.”

Giles waved them onto the couch and Willow glanced along at Gunn and Wesley’s faces, relieved to see they were looking like she was feeling – as if their eccentric guardian might be about to tell them all that he had arranged for them to have a wonderful field trip to Siberia to look for frozen mammoth remains, and as an extra special treat had decided they could all sleep in the open and live off canned sardines.

“What kind of covert operation?” Gunn demanded. “What are we looking for?”

Giles shrugged. “The usual things that go bump in the night. We know from that revealing spell that there is certainly no shortage of them around here. And we also know that those in need used to have people they could turn to in times of supernatural difficulty who are no longer available.”

Willow and Gunn exchanged a glance. “Dora and Karin,” Willow said.

It was Wesley who said: “The bookshop.”

“Yes.” Giles beamed at him almost paternally. “A gold star for Wesley.”

“We work better for food,” Gunn told him.

Giles didn’t miss a beat, opening the biscuit tin and proffering it. “A chocolate digestive for Wesley then.” 

“When did you think of this?” Willow demanded.

“When I was in the bookshop. It was clear from what Beth told us that people had got into the habit of relying on Dora and Karin to help them in times of difficulty, and it was very obvious from the feel of that place that it had been carefully situated over an area of no inconsiderable mystical power. I suspect it’s been a gathering place for witches for centuries. And it’s obvious that the moors attract all manner of supernatural entities, both positive and negative. I think we could do good here, and although I may be wrong, I imagine that’s what we all want to do most of all – for the sake of those that are gone, and those that remain – do good.”

Still holding his chocolate digestive, Wesley looked up at Giles as if he had also just come into focus. “Yes.”

“Yes, you think it’s a good idea?”

“Yes, but...” Wesley turned to Gunn, abruptly full of doubt that the man might not agree with him. It was clear that however much he liked the idea of having their own bookstore to play in, not to mention the added bonus of an area of mystical convergence to investigate, that to do so was unthinkable without the company of Gunn. 

Gunn looked at him in surprise. “Yeah, sure. Why not? If there’s one demon-raising cult around here there are probably others. You sure the Watchers’ Council are going to pay up though, cause I don’t think Wes and I can buy a bookstore out of what we’ve got in loose change?”

“As one of their most senior surviving members I can pretty much guarantee it,” Giles assured him. “Besides, mystical convergence and meeting point for witches aside, the Council has never been able to resist a chance to get its fingers on more sacred grimoires and that shop had several.”

Gunn got up and poured them all another cup of tea from the pot. It was now very diluted with water and not particularly hot, but he solemnly handed them all a cup of brownish liquid and then held up his own. “To the Tea Shop Detectives.”

“Soon to be the Bookstore Detectives,” Willow clunked her cup against his.

“Book _shop_ Detectives,” Giles corrected pedantically. “You’re in England now.”

Gunn rolled his eyes but touched his cup to Willow’s again. “To the Bookshop Detectives.”

“And to not being dead and the three of you being real,” Wesley added quietly.

Gunn reached out and ruffled his hair gently. “Yeah, man, I’ll definitely drink to that.”

***

The moor felt clearer today, bright as a new day after thunder, the smell of sulphur and burnt hair no longer carried on the breeze. Giles was grateful for the sunlight and the birdsong, and for the stillness; no tourists up here today after the newspaper headlines of yet another slaying; each front page carrying a picture of the dead policeman. Someone else he had been too late to save. There would always be those. Part of the burden of joining the battle was that one didn’t get to avert one’s eyes from the fallen; each death feeling like a failure, while each life saved could sometimes be forgotten. It was always the fixed gaze of the dead, not the grateful smiles of the living, whose memory lingered longest. 

Thinking of all the patience he hadn’t used on Wesley when he probably should have done, he had been a little nicer to Andrew than usual when putting in his call for the Council to arrange to buy the Black Cat Bookshop. Perhaps as a consequence Andrew had been a little more efficient, getting back to him in a surprisingly short time to say that the Council lawyers were finding oddly few impediments to the sale, and that the executors of the dead women had even seemed to expect their call. On another day that would have surprised Giles more, but he was still thinking about that flash of an official badge out of the darkness, to let him know that their actions had been observed and apparently had met with no criticism. 

It had felt as if they had been expected on that moor as well. Not them specifically, but what they represented; replacements for the women who had been lost. Perhaps that was why Cordelia had been allowed to interfere. While she had been rebelliously lending Willow the power to bring back Wesley from the dead, perhaps the Higher Powers who had been pulling Angel’s strings for so long, had been deliberately turning a blind eye. They had let Doyle die as part of his own destiny, knowing that another would carry the visions for Angel, another would help bind him to humanity. Not unlike the Senior Partners, the Powers had an unappealing tolerance for human death as part of the machinery of their grand design. It had evidently mattered that someone took Dora and Karin’s place, yet had not mattered if they themselves were lost. No doubt Gunn and Wesley would have been considered equally unimportant and replaceable had Cordelia not insisted that even if they were pawns they should still be allowed to stay in the game.

The dark cleft between the rocks in which Alicia had died still chilled him, but he had brought a thermos to ward off the inevitable cold. 

Before Giles had left them all to their celebration of Wesley’s acceptance of them as real people and not hallucinations, Gunn had already been complaining about the weather. “This is summer, right? This is the warm part of your year? And this is as hot as it gets?” What did the man expect in Yorkshire? Giles had tried to tell him that it could be worse, they could have found themselves in the Hebrides, but Gunn had been unconvinced, muttering darkly about what kind of a country it was when you had to wear a sweater in June. 

Giles realized he had no idea about the living accommodation over the bookshop, or if it would be remotely suitable for four unrelated people, who may intend to have future romantic relationships with people they had not yet met. When he thought of the inconvenience of Gunn and Wesley making sheep’s eyes at various women, not to mention more total strangers having to be introduced into their new family unit, he almost hoped those two did turn out to be gay, which would at least stop them bringing any potentially irritating or dangerous women home. Willow was the only person of his acquaintance whose chosen partners had not been demonic or irritating. Oz had admittedly been a werewolf, and occasioned some inconvenience on three days of the month, but compared with Angel and Spike he had been an absolute breeze. Riley had been very little trouble as well, despite working for that hellish Walsh woman. Tara had been so perfect a surrogate in-law that he should have known from the start that she was doomed, while Kennedy had been robust, confident and sensible. Nor had she been in any way a vampire. Perhaps it was just as well that he and Buffy were on different continents while she was dating the Immortal. He would have found it almost impossible to hide his disapproval.

He would hope for four bedrooms but settle for three. No doubt it was selfish, but he was at the age when a certain amount of selfishness seemed entirely acceptable to him, and the truth was that he didn’t care if Wesley and Gunn had to share or didn’t share a bedroom, as long as he had one to himself.

He gazed between the rocks again, having to steel himself to do it. Light had found its way only a little distance between the shadows, but some of the brimstone feel was gone; the spell attempted here entirely banished, and only the faintest scent of scorched earth remaining.

Giles said quietly: “Alicia, I came to say that I was sorry for my part in teaching you witchcraft. I’m sorry for all the times that I wasn’t there when you may have needed me. And I’m most sorry of all for not being here, in this place, when you needed to be saved and no one came. But I’m so very grateful for having known you and for every hour I got to spend with you, and I know your mother is, too. I miss you and I hope you’ve moved on to something better, but just in case there’s some part of you still lingering here, I thought I’d say goodbye, and do this…”

He unscrewed the lid of his thermos and poured out a cup of tea, taking a refreshing sip before opening the book he had brought at the page he had marked with a tissue and beginning to read:

“‘ _The Third Day of May_. The chestnut candle flowers are blooming now as George Middleton travels in an open carriage towards his wedding…’” 

He read on, through the last little moments she had missed by so few pages, the strange sound of George’s cry as he took his new wife’s hand and pressed it to his lips; and the flower petals falling on the new couple like scented snow. The letter from King Christian IV of Denmark to his nephew King Charles I, and finally flawed, selfish Kirsten, who had, inevitably, managed to have the last word.

As he read he felt a sense of peace flow through him. The grief was still there, but it was no longer just a gaping crater of loss. It was filling up with memories that made him smile as well as weep; that sense of gratitude for a life lived that he had been allowed to share from time to time, even a life cut short. It helped him to think that Alicia had waited to say goodbye, not because she needed it, but because she knew that he did, and he imagined her visiting her mother in the apple orchard to dispense this same feeling of healing peace. 

He felt forgiven; not by himself; how could one ever forgive oneself after striving to save so many strangers yet being on the wrong side of the Atlantic when a family member had needed one so very much? But if felt as if Alicia forgave him. No, it felt as if she had never blamed him. As if she wanted him to remember her now not as a silenced voice trying to scream for help he had not given her, but as someone who had loved to watch her birthday cake float across the room, and to whom he had slipped those little bags of sherbet lemons that had always congealed into a sticky mess of melted sugar and dissolving paper in the warmth of her pocket. As if she wanted him to remember her as someone who had moved on to somewhere else, was perhaps a million atoms scattering into space, ready to be reborn into some new and wonderful sentient thing, or else had gone where witches chose to spend their afterdays in cottages with crooked chimneys, stirring the inevitable cauldrons, while black cats wound themselves around their booted feet, their long black tails set in a permanent question mark.

The last lines and he offered them to her in case she had need of them, wherever she might be:

“‘I take their hands in mine, the Black upon the White and the White upon the Black, and I say to them: ‘Give me the Wings of Angels, the Wings of Demons. Lift me up and let me fly.’”

##### The End

**Author's Note:**

> OTHER NOTES (only bother reading these if you really do have a lot of time on your hands): This fic was the result of a dream I had where Wesley, Gunn, Giles and Willow were sitting in a teashop in Harrogate discussing supernatural doings while Wesley was squirrelly and scribbled on a napkin and a woman came around and said ‘more tea, dears?’ I liked the idea but then had another dream that was clearly set in the same world but where they had now moved on to a different place, so I wrote that down, and then realized I needed to write the beginning of the story first, so did. The only reason it’s set in Harrogate is because that’s where they were in the dream. Hastings would have made more sense, as I’d been watching ‘Foyle’s War’, but my subconscious is apparently as geographically challenged as I am so Harrogate it was. If my subconscious is reading this and would like to send me any more dreams it would be nice if Wesley was naked in them, preferably making out with Angel (or Gunn), and the setting was something like Bristol or Bath, which I could actually write about without the need for lots of research. I did start the sequel when I wrote this originally and hope to dust it off and finish it at some point.


End file.
